Voice AI company Wispr is seeing significant traction with its dictation app, Wispr Flow. After three months of use, the average user writes more than fifty percent of their characters through the application. The company has also reached 270 of the Fortune 500 companies and has secured 125 enterprise customers.
Following a thirty million dollar funding round led by Menlo Ventures in June, the company has now raised an additional twenty-five million dollars. This new round was led by Notable Capital with participation from Steven Bartlett’s Flight Fund. With this new capital, Wispr has raised a total of eighty-one million dollars. Hans Tung from Notable Capital, an investor in companies like Affirm, Airbnb, and Anthropic, is joining Wispr’s board as an observer.
Wispr’s CEO, Tanay Kothari, reported that since June, Wispr Flow has grown forty percent month-over-month. The product has become popular within the venture capital community, leading to a lot of inbound investor interest. The company was not initially planning to raise more funding due to a long runway and a lean team, but the interest from notable investors like Hans Tung and Steven Bartlett made it an attractive opportunity. Kothari noted that the team from Notable Capital had done deep research, including interviews with competitors, and built a strong case for investing in Wispr.
The company is now focusing on international growth and new product opportunities. The additional funding will help the startup hire top machine learning talent that might otherwise go to larger companies like OpenAI or Anthropic. User growth is strong, with the company reporting a one hundred times larger user base compared to last year and a seventy percent retention rate over twelve months.
The startup did face a challenge when more non-technical users began using the app. These users would install the app, try the dictation feature within the app itself, and then stop using it. The issue was a lack of clear guidance showing that dictation could be used in other applications. To solve this, Wispr created a new user design flow that guides people to use dictation in their most frequently used apps.
Wispr also plans to make the Flow app available on more platforms beyond Windows, Mac, and iOS. The company is developing an Android app, with a beta version expected by the end of the year and a stable version planned for release in the first quarter of 2025.
Another goal is to invest in building its own voice models for personalized Automatic Speech Recognition. This aims to better understand users and reduce the number of edits needed after dictation. The company claims its current error rate is around ten percent, which it states is lower than OpenAI’s Whisper at twenty-seven percent and Apple’s native transcription at forty-seven percent.
Wispr is not immediately looking to expand beyond consumer applications, but it is testing its technology through a closed API with select enterprise and hardware partners. It expects to make the API available to more developers next year.
While Wispr has attracted significant venture capital attention, it faces competition in the dictation space from other apps. These include Y Combinator-backed Willow and Aqua, Monologue which is part of a subscription bundle, along with Typeless, Talktastic, Superwhisper, and Betterdictation.
Wispr aims to be more than just a dictation tool by automating certain tasks, such as replying to emails. An investor from Notable Capital said he likes that Wispr is trying to become a voice-led operating system that can initiate workflow automation. He was impressed by the quality of the people recruited and the speed at which the company operates.