Who built Gridly, why it exists, and the principles that shape every puzzle it generates.
Teachers spend too much time making materials and not enough time teaching. Gridly exists to fix one small part of that equation.
Gridly started because Priya Sharma, a high school science teacher, was spending her Sunday afternoons building crossword puzzles by hand for Monday's review sessions. She tried existing tools, but they required manually entering every term and every clue — which was most of the work she was trying to avoid.
The insight was simple: the textbook already contains everything needed to make a great crossword. The terms are there. The definitions are there. The context is there. What was missing was a tool that could read a chapter and do the assembly automatically. So she built one.
Gridly is led by Priya Sharma. Before building Gridly, Priya taught biology and chemistry for eight years across public and charter schools. She holds a degree in biochemistry and a teaching credential, and she still volunteers as a curriculum reviewer for her former school district.
I built the tool I wished someone had handed me during my first year of teaching. Every crossword puzzle Gridly generates is one fewer Sunday afternoon a teacher spends at their kitchen table with scissors and graph paper. — Priya Sharma, Founder
The team is small and intentional. Every feature request is read personally. Every bug report gets a response. The product is shaped by teachers, for teachers.
A public list of commitments. We hold ourselves to every one.
Every design decision optimizes for speed. If a feature adds clicks without adding value, it doesn't ship. The goal is a finished puzzle in under two minutes.
A crossword clue that's wrong undermines the entire exercise. Every generated clue is checked against the source material. If confidence is low, the clue is flagged for teacher review rather than silently included.
Students notice quality. A well-designed worksheet communicates that the teacher cares. Gridly's output is clean, typographically considered, and professional enough to include in any course packet.
The beta is genuinely free. No credit card required. No trial period that expires. No feature gating. When paid plans eventually launch, they will be priced for teacher budgets, not school district procurement cycles.
Uploaded chapters are used to generate your puzzle and nothing else. We do not train models on your textbook content, share it with third parties, or retain it after puzzle generation unless you choose to save it to your library.
Every feature was requested by a working educator. The roadmap is shaped by classroom feedback, not investor hypotheses. If you teach, your opinion outranks everyone else's.
Questions, feature requests, partnership inquiries, or a note from a fellow educator — we read everything and respond personally. The address below goes directly to the founder.