Voice AI company Wispr’s dictation app, Wispr Flow, is seeing great traction. The startup said that, after three months of usage, an average user writes more than 50% of their characters through the app. The company has also reached 270 of the Fortune 500 companies and has signed 125 companies as enterprise customers.
That’s why, after just raising a $30 million round led by Menlo Ventures in June, the company has now raised an additional $25 million led by Notable Capital with participation from Steven Bartlett’s Flight Fund, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. With this influx of capital, the company has raised $81 million in total.
Notable’s Hans Tung, who has backed companies like Affirm, Airbnb, Slack, Coinbase, Anthropic, and TikTok, is joining Wispr’s board as an observer.
Wispr’s CEO Tanay Kothari said that, since June, Wispr Flow has grown 40% month-over-month. Plus, the product has been quite popular within the VC community. And because of that, the company started getting a lot of inbound investor interest. (Granola is another such example of this trend).
“We were still not planning to raise anytime soon because we had a really long runway and the team’s really lean. But when I heard from Hans and Steven, it made sense to put something together to bring them on,” Kothari told TechCrunch.
Kothari added that when Notable’s team, including investor Chelcie Taylor, presented to him, they had done deep research, interviews with competitors, and had built a strong case about investing in Wispr.
Image Credits: Wispr
Kothari said the company is now thinking about international growth and new product opportunities. With the additional funding, the startup would be able to hire top machine learning talent that might otherwise go to a company like OpenAI or Anthropic.
The CEO is pleased with user growth and said that the company is at 100x user base year-over-year with 70% retention over 12 months.
However, he recalled there was a time when the startup noticed a dip as more non-technical people discovered the app. Those people installed the app, tried out the dictation feature within the app, and then dropped off. The problem was that there was no clear guidance to indicate that they could use the dictation in other apps, too. To address this, the startup created a design flow for new users to guide them to use dictation in the apps they use the most.
Wispr also wants the Flow app to be available on more surfaces apart from Windows, Mac, and iOS. The company is working on an Android app with a beta version slated to be out by year-end, followed by a stable version launch in Q1 2025.
The company also wants to invest in building its own voice models to understand users better with personalized Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). It aims to reduce the number of edits the users have to make after they dictate through Flow. Currently, its error rate is around 10%, lower than 27% for OpenAI’s Whisper and 47% for Apple’s native transcription, it claims.
Image Credits: Wispr
Wispr is not thinking of expanding beyond consumer applications immediately, but it is testing its technology through a closed API with select enterprises and hardware partners and expects to open it up to more developers next year.
While Wispr has received more VC attention, there are other apps that are competing with it too in the dictation space, including YC-backed Willow and Aqua; Monologue, which is part of Every’s subscription bundle; along with Typeless Talktastic, Superwhisper, and Betterdictation.
Wispr wants to be more than a dictation tool by automating some of the tasks, like replying to emails.
“What I really like about Wispr is that they are trying to be more than a dictation app and become like a voice-led operating system that can initiate workflow automation. The quality of the people they have recruited and the speed at which they interact have impressed me a lot since we met them,” Notable’s Tung told TechCrunch over a call.
He added that, as he has invested in apps with a great interface and user experiences that scale well, he also sees that potential in Wispr Flow.
