Wispr, the voice AI company, is seeing significant traction with its dictation app, Wispr Flow. After three months of use, the average user writes more than half of their characters through the app. The startup 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 influx of 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.
According to CEO Tanay Kothari, Wispr Flow has grown forty percent month-over-month since June. The product has also become popular within the venture capital community, leading to a lot of inbound investor interest.
Kothari stated the company was not planning to raise more capital so soon due to a long runway and a lean team. However, after hearing from Hans Tung and Steven Bartlett, it made sense to arrange a deal to bring them on board. He noted that the team from Notable Capital, including investor Chelcie Taylor, had done deep research, interviewed competitors, and built a strong case for investing in Wispr.
The company is now considering international growth and new product opportunities. The additional funding will help the startup hire top machine learning talent that might otherwise go to a company 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.
Kothari recalled a period when the startup noticed a user dip as more non-technical people discovered the app. These users would install the app, try the dictation feature within it, and then stop using it. The problem was a lack of clear guidance showing that dictation could be used in other applications. To fix this, the startup created a new user design flow to guide people to use dictation in their most frequently used apps.
Wispr also aims 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 launch in the first quarter of 2025.
The company plans to invest in building its own voice models for personalized Automatic Speech Recognition to better understand users. The goal is to reduce the number of edits users have to make after dictating through Flow. Wispr claims its current error rate is around ten percent, which 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 enterprises and hardware partners. It expects to make the API available to more developers next year.
While Wispr has attracted more venture capital attention, other apps compete in the dictation space. These include Y Combinator-backed Willow and Aqua, Monologue which is part of Every’s 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.
Notable Capital’s Hans Tung said that what he really likes about Wispr is their effort to become more than a dictation app and evolve into a voice-led operating system that can initiate workflow automation. He was impressed by the quality of the people they have recruited and the speed at which they operate. Having invested in apps with great interfaces and user experiences that scale well, he sees that same potential in Wispr Flow.