Voice AI company Wispr’s dictation app, Wispr Flow, is gaining traction. The startup said that after three months of use, an average user writes more than 50% of their grades 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 another $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 Hans Tung, who has backed companies such as Affirm, Airbnb, Slack, Coinbase, Anthropic and TikTok, joins Wispr’s board as an observer.
Wispr CEO Tanay Kothari said since June, Wispr Flow has grown 40% month-over-month. Plus, the product has been quite popular in 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 still weren’t planning on raising anything anytime soon because we had a really long runway and the team is really lean. But when I heard from Hans and Steven, it made sense to put something together to bring them forward,” Kothari told TechCrunch.
Kothari added that when Notable’s team, including investor Chelcie Taylor, pitched him, they had done deep research, interviewed competitors and had built a strong case to invest in Wispr.
Kothari said the company is now thinking about international growth and new product opportunities. With the extra funding, the startup would be able to hire top machine learning talent who might otherwise go to a company like OpenAI or Anthropic.
The CEO is pleased with the user growth and said the company is at 100x user base year-over-year with 70% retention over 12 months.
However, he recalled that there was a time when the startup noticed a decline as more non-technical people discovered the app. These people installed the app, tried the dictation feature in the app, and then dropped out. The problem was that there was no clear guidance to indicate that they could also use the dictation in other apps. 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 besides Windows, Mac and iOS. The company is working on an Android app with a beta version expected to be out by the end of the year, followed by a stable version launch in Q1 2025.
The company also wants to invest in building its own voice models to better understand users with personalized automatic speech recognition (ASR). It aims to reduce the number of edits users have to make after dictating through Flow. Currently, its error rate is around 10%, lower than 27% for OpenAI’s Whisper and 47% for Apple’s original transcription, it claims.
Wispr isn’t thinking of expanding beyond consumer applications right away, but it’s testing its technology through a closed API with select companies and hardware partners and expects to open it up to more developers next year.
While Wispr has gotten more VC attention, there are other apps competing with it in the dictation space as well, including YC-backed Willow and Aqua; Monologue, which is part of Every’s subscription package; along with Typeless Talktastic, Superwhisper and Betterdictation.
Wispr wants to be more than a dictation tool by automating some of the tasks, like answering emails.
“What I really like about Wispr is that they’re trying to be more than a dictation app and become like a voice-controlled operating system that can initiate workflow automation. The quality of the people they’ve recruited and the speed with which they interact have impressed me a lot since we met them,” Notable’s Tung told TechCrunch over a call.
He added that since he has invested in apps with a great interface and user experiences that scale well, he also sees that potential in Wispr Flow.