Wispr has raised $280 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation as the company expands its voice-based interface technology and launches its first proprietary speech model. The financing brings Wispr’s total capital raised to $361 million and comes only six months after the company’s oversubscribed Series A2. Menlo Ventures led the round, representing one of the firm’s largest investments in an artificial intelligence company. Existing investors Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC and MVP Ventures also participated. New investors include Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund and PLUS Capital.
The round also attracted a group of athletes and cultural figures including Livvy Dunne, Shaun White, Dak Prescott, DK Metcalf, Joe Burrow, Kyle Hamilton, Aaron Gordon, Alex Caruso, Domantas Sabonis, Klay Thompson, Paul George and Trae Young.
The financing follows rapid adoption of Flow, Wispr’s flagship voice dictation product.
Flow is now used by millions of people globally, including employees at most Fortune 500 companies and across more than 125,000 businesses.
Wispr said revenue has increased by more than 150% in each of the past four quarters.
The company believes that growth reflects a broader change in how people interact with computers as voice moves beyond occasional dictation and becomes a regular way to create content, communicate ideas and work across software applications.
Wispr’s broader objective is to make interacting with computers feel more like natural conversation.
Flow was designed as an initial step toward that goal by allowing users to convert speech into text more fluidly across applications.
The company now intends to move beyond basic dictation and build what it describes as an intelligence layer underlying human-AI interaction.
Wispr plans to begin with voice and eventually extend that platform into additional modalities and hardware interfaces.
A major component of that strategy is the newly formed Wispr Advanced Interfaces Lab.
The research organization is being led by Ariya Rastrow, who recently joined Wispr as Chief Scientist.
Rastrow was a founding member of Amazon’s Alexa team and previously served as a multimodal foundation model lead at Meta.
Wispr has also recruited researchers and engineers from major technology companies and academic institutions as it expands its work into wearables and other interface technologies.
Alongside the Series B, Wispr unveiled a preview of Canto, the first proprietary speech model developed by the new research lab.
Canto is designed to improve transcription accuracy in real-world environments where traditional speech recognition systems can struggle.
Those conditions include substantial background noise, wind and strong accents.
Wispr said that under especially challenging acoustic conditions, Canto can reduce word error rates from more than 30% to approximately 5% to 10%.
The company expects the improvement to result in users needing to edit roughly 30% to 35% fewer dictations overall.
Unlike systems trained primarily around controlled benchmarking environments, Canto is trained using real-world usage data and contextual signals.
Wispr sees that approach as important because everyday speech interactions frequently occur in settings substantially more complicated than laboratory audio samples.
The launch marks an important transition for Wispr from relying primarily on an application layer toward building more of the underlying AI technology powering its products.
The company believes owning its speech models can allow it to optimize them around the specific environments, user behaviors and interaction patterns generated by Flow.
Wispr’s long-term strategy is based on the view that AI model intelligence is advancing more quickly than the interfaces people use to communicate with those models.
While AI systems can increasingly understand complicated instructions and perform sophisticated tasks, many interactions still begin with users typing into a text box.
Wispr sees voice as a way to reduce friction between what a person is thinking and how quickly that intent can be expressed to software.
That opportunity extends beyond desktop dictation.
The company’s research lab is investigating interfaces including wearables, where voice and other modalities could become more important because conventional keyboards and screens are less practical.
The new financing will support the recruitment of additional technical and research talent, expansion of the Advanced Interfaces Lab and development of new products.
Wispr also plans to continue improving Flow while building technologies intended to position voice as a foundational interface layer across software and hardware.
The company’s adoption inside large enterprises has so far largely been driven from the employee level rather than through a traditional top-down enterprise sales strategy.
Menlo Ventures highlighted Flow’s spread across much of the Fortune 500 before Wispr had developed a substantial sales organization as evidence of organic demand for the product.
With millions of users, adoption across more than 125,000 companies, four consecutive quarters of revenue growth exceeding 150% and $280 million of new capital, Wispr is now attempting to turn that early traction into a broader platform for voice-driven human-computer interaction.
KEY QUOTES:
“Dictation was always the starting point for something bigger. The real ambition is to build voice into the foundational layer beneath every other piece of software and hardware.”
“This funding allows us to hire the technical and research talent to power our lab, launch new products, and build the next era of human-computer interaction around voice.”
Tanay Kothari, Co-Founder and CEO of Wispr
“The frontier labs have largely settled whether AI can understand and reason. What nobody has settled is how a normal person conveys intent to that intelligence, and today’s answer, typing into a text box, is a tax on thought.”
“The bottleneck in AI has moved from the model to the human interface to the model, and Wispr is the interface. We watched Flow spread through most of the Fortune 500 before there was a sales team to speak of, pulled in by employees one desk at a time.”
“That is why this is one of the largest AI investments in our firm’s history: voice is becoming part of every department at every company, and Wispr is building what comes after the text box.”
Matt Kraning, Partner at Menlo Ventures
