AI dictation firm Wispr valued at $2bn after $280m raise

Wispr, the US-based company behind the AI dictation tool Wispr Flow, has raised $280m in Series B funding at a $2bn valuation.

The round was led by existing investor Menlo Ventures and takes Wispr’s total funding to date to $361m.

Other backers in the round include existing investors Neo Ventures, NEA, 8VC, Notable Capital, and MVP Ventures.

New investors include Acrew, Forerunner, Activate, Goodwater, Together Fund, Peak XV, and PLUS Capital.

The round also involved certain athletes, artists, and cultural figures including Livvy Dunne, DK Metcalf, Shaun White, Joe Burrow, Dak Prescott, Kyle Hamilton, Alex Caruso, Domantas Sabonis, Aaron Gordon, Klay Thompson, Paul George and Trae Young.

Wispr Flow is an AI-powered voice-to-text dictation application that converts spoken speech into formatted text across different apps.

Wispr said the funding would support its expansion beyond dictation into new areas such as meeting transcription, following the recent launch of its Notetaker tool.

The company also announced a preview of Canto, its first proprietary speech model. In noisy conditions involving background noise, wind, accents or music, the model reduces word error rates from more than 30% to between 5% and 10%.

Across everyday use, the company expects it to cut the number of dictations requiring editing by 30% to 35%.

Domantas Sabonis, three-time NBA All-Star, said: “I use Flow every day. I grew up rotating between English, Spanish, and Lithuanian, and it keeps up with me no matter which one I’m speaking. So the opportunity to invest and support a product I use and believe in was a no brainer.”

Wispr said it measures performance internally using what it calls a “zero edit rate,” the share of dictated speech that requires no correction.

The company has also established the Wispr Advanced Interfaces Lab, led by chief scientist Ariya Rastrow, a founding member of the Alexa team.

“The whole reason to talk instead of type is to stay inside your own train of thought,” the company said, adding that it aims to build “systems that understand what you meant, hold the context of what you’re doing, and turn that into an outcome rather than a block of text.”

Wispr said users have written more than 60 billion words using Flow, with the product now used by people at almost all Fortune 500 companies and more than 10,000 enterprises.