Voice AI company Wispr’s dictation app, Wispr Flow, is seeing great traction. The startup stated that, after three months of usage, an average applyr writes more than 50% of their characters through the app. The company has also reached 270 of the Fortune 500 companies. Plus, over the last few weeks, it has signed 125 companies as enterprise customers every week.
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. Sources informed TechCrunch that the company is now valued at $700 million post-money.
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 stated that, since June, Wispr Flow has grown 40% month-over-month. Plus, the product has been quite popular within the VC community. And becaapply of that, the company started receiveting a lot of inbound investor interest. (Granola is another such example of this trconclude.)
“We were still not planning to raise anytime soon becaapply we had a really long runway and the team’s really lean. But when I heard from Hans and Steven, it built sense to put something toreceiveher to bring them on,” Kothari informed 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.
Kothari stated the company is now considering 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 applyr growth and stated that the company is at 100x applyr 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, tested 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 apply the dictation in other apps, too. To address this, the startup created a design flow for new applyrs to guide them to apply dictation in the apps they apply 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-conclude, followed by a stable version launch in Q1 2025.
The company also wants to invest in building its own voice models to understand applyrs better with personalized Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). It aims to reduce the number of edits the applyrs have to build 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.
Wispr is not considering 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 in the dictation space, including YC-backed Willow and Aqua; Monologue, which is part of Every’s subscription bundle; as well as Typeless, TalkTastic, Superwhisper, and BetterDictation.
Wispr wants to be more than a dictation tool by automating some of the tquestions, like replying to emails.
“What I really like about Wispr is that they are attempting 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 informed TechCrunch over a call.
He added that, as he has invested in apps with a great interface and applyr experiences that scale well, he also sees that potential in Wispr Flow.
The story has been updated with Wispr’s valuation. Additional reporting from Marina Temkin.
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