Wispr, a startup known for its AI dictation tools, has raised $280 million in Series B funding led by Menlo Ventures at a valuation of $2 billion, the company announced Monday. The funding will allow Wispr to expand its footprint by expanding into new areas such as meetings with the newly released note-taking tool.
With this latest round of funding, the company has raised $361 million to date. The last round took place less than 10 months ago.
This new capital comes at a time of increased competition in the dictation space with apps such as Willow, Monolouge, Aqua, and Superwisper. Additionally, several developers are creating free or low-cost tools for pro-consumers.
Existing investors including Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures doubled down on the latest round. The company also attracted new investors including Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital.
Along with the funding news, Wispr announced the launch of a new model to improve the quality of speech understanding. In recent weeks, several users have complained about the poor quality of Wispr Flow’s dictation output. The company said the new model, called Canto, will reduce the error rate from 30% to less than 10%.
Since November last year, Wispr has launched a dictation app on Android and expanded its go-to-market team in regions such as India and the UK.
It’s also partnered with hardware makers like Oasis Ring to allow customers to dictate to their devices without having to speak out loud. Apart from that, we are using Meeting Notetaker to compete against other companies in the space such as Granola, Fireflies, and Read AI. Wispr’s Notetaker can display summaries and action items, but there’s also room to integrate with other tools to update and draft documents and emails.
Last month, the startup announced it was forming Wispr Interface Labs under Ariya Rastrow, one of the early people working on Amazon Alexa. In this lab, Wispr aims to explore new interfaces for human-computer interaction.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
