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Wispr Flow’s Series B
Wispr Flow, a San Francisco-based voice-to-text software maker, announced a $280 million Series B round on Monday that values the company at $2 billion, valuing it at a level it said it reached after nearly tripling its valuation in nine months.
“AI startup Wispr Flow has nearly tripled its valuation to $2 billion in nine months”
The financing, led by Menlo Ventures and joined by existing backers Notable Capital, NEA, and Neo Ventures, brings Wispr Flow’s total capital raised to $361 million.
Wispr said its software has now been used to generate more than 60 billion words, with adoption spanning nearly all Fortune 500 companies and more than 10,000 enterprises.
Alongside the funding, Wispr unveiled a preview of Canto, its first proprietary speech-recognition model, designed for real-world acoustic conditions rather than quiet environments typically used to train and benchmark voice systems.
CEO Tanay Kothari said in a blog post, "We built this model for where people actually use Flow."
Canto targets noisy errors
Wispr said Canto is designed for "the hardest conditions, with background noise, wind, heavy accents or music," where it claims error rates fall from more than 30% of words to somewhere between 5% and 10%.
In the same preview, Wispr tied the model to recent user reports of a quality dip in dictation output over recent weeks, and said it would use the new funding to improve transcription accuracy.
The company also described an internal accuracy metric, saying it tracks transcription accuracy through a "zero edit rate" target, or the share of spoken words that require no corrections.
Fortune reported that Matt Kraning, a Menlo Ventures partner, said, "Dictation is how you get in the door."
Fortune also quoted Kothari and Garg framing dictation as a starting point, with Garg telling Fortune, "Everything about these tools is about trust."
From dictation to interfaces
Wispr said it is expanding beyond dictation with a meeting notetaker that displays summaries and action items, placing it in direct competition with tools such as Granola, Fireflies and Read AI.
“Its meeting note-taker now competes with tools like Granola, Fireflies, and Read AI”
The company also said it has struck partnerships with hardware makers, including the Oasis ring, to let customers dictate without speaking loudly into a device.
Last month, Wispr launched Wispr Interface Labs under Ariya Rastrow, an early contributor to Amazon Alexa, tasked with exploring new interfaces for human-computer interaction.
Reuters quoted Michael Ashley Schulman, partner at Cerity Partners, saying, "The value may be there if the growth rate survives," while noting the difficulty of sustaining triple-digit quarterly growth.
In the same Reuters package, Wispr said its products are used at more than 10,000 enterprises, while competition in the AI dictation space includes apps such as Willow, Monologue, Aqua and Superwhisper.
