Voice AI company Wispr’s dictation app Wispr Flow is getting a lot of attention. The company says that after three months of use, the average user writes more than 50% of their letters via the app. The company also works with 270 of the Fortune 500 companies and has 125 enterprise customers.
That’s why the company, which just raised $30 million led by Menlo Ventures in June, has now raised another $25 million led by Notable Capital with participation from Steven Bartlett’s Flight Fund, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. With this capital infusion, the company has raised a total of $81 million.
Notable’s Hans Tung, who has backed companies such as Affirm, Airbnb, Slack, Coinbase, Anthropic and TikTok, will join Wispr’s board as an observer.
Wispr CEO Tanay Kothari said that since June, Wispr Flow has grown 40% month-on-month. Additionally, this product is extremely popular within the VC community. Therefore, the company started attracting a lot of interest from inbound investors. (Granola is also an example of this trend.)
“We didn’t have any immediate plans to raise money yet because the runway was so long and the team was so weak. But when we heard from Hans and Stephen, we thought it made sense to put something together to bring them in,” Kothari told TechCrunch.
Kothari added that when Notable’s team, including investor Chelsea Taylor, presented to him, they had done thorough research and interviews with competitors and had built a strong case for investing in Wispr.
Kothari said the company is currently considering international growth and new product opportunities. With additional funding, the startup will be able to hire top machine learning talent who might otherwise go to companies like OpenAI or Anthropic.
The CEO is pleased with the user growth, stating that the company’s user base has grown 100 times year-over-year, with a 12-month retention rate of 70%.
However, he recalled that there was a time when the startup noticed a slump as more non-technical people became aware of the app. Those people installed the app, tried the in-app dictation feature, and then gave up. The problem was that there was no clear guidance indicating that other apps could use dictation as well. To address this, the startup created a design flow that guides new users to use dictation in the apps they use most.
Wispr also wants to make the Flow app available on more environments than Windows, Mac, and iOS. The company is working on an Android app, with a beta version expected to be released by the end of the year, followed by a stable version in Q1 2025.
The company also wants to invest in building its own voice models to better understand users using personalized automatic speech recognition (ASR). This is intended to reduce the number of edits that need to be made after the user directs you through the flow. Currently, its error rate is around 10%, lower than OpenAI’s Whisper’s 27% and Apple’s native transcription’s 47%.
Wispr doesn’t plan to expand beyond consumer applications anytime soon, but it is testing its technology through a closed API with some enterprise and hardware partners, and plans to open it up to more developers next year.
While Wispr has attracted VC attention, there are other apps that compete with Wispr in the dictation space, including YC-backed Willow and Aqua. Monologue is part of Every’s subscription bundle. So are Typeless, TalkTastic, Superwisper, and BetterDictation.
Wispr wants to be more than just a dictation tool by automating some tasks, such as replying to emails.
“What I really like about Wispr is that they’re trying to go beyond a dictation app and become more like a voice-driven operating system where you can start automating your workflows. I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the people they’ve hired and the speed of their interactions since I met them,” Notable’s Tung told TechCrunch over the phone.
He added that he has invested in apps with great interfaces and scalable user experiences, so he sees potential in Wispr Flow as well.
