Automattic Acquires Harper; Founder Elijah Potter Joins the Team as Code Wrangler

Automattic has acquired Harper, a grammar checker tailored for developers. Its founder, Elijah Potter, will join Automattic as a Code Wrangler, contributing significantly to the improvement of the company’s product lineup. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Harper, named after novelist Harper Lee, is an open source alternative to Grammarly. Potter had created it “after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.” According to Potter, Harper is the “grammar checker that fits my needs. Not only does it take milliseconds to lint a document, take less than 1/50th of LanguageTool’s memory footprint, but it is also completely private.”

It provides grammar and language suggestions with impressive speed—under 20 milliseconds—far outpacing other popular grammar checkers. Available as a language server and through WebAssembly, Harper combines lightning-fast performance with a strong commitment to user privacy, processing all data locally on the user’s device.

Welcoming Harper Matt Mullenweg said, “The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded everywhere. I’m a huge fan of Grammarly and use it every day, but I think we’re doing too much in the cloud right now and there is so much compute and potential at the edge, and I’m excited to drive that forward with projects like Harper, Gutenberg, and Playground.”