Wispr, maker of the AI dictation app Flow, announced on August 17 a 280 million dollar Series B round led by Menlo Ventures at a 2 billion dollar valuation, nearly tripling the companys worth roughly nine months after its previous round. The financing brings Wispr's total capital raised to 361 million dollars. Existing backers Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures returned, joined by new investors including Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital, alongside a group of professional athletes such as Joe Burrow, Shaun White, Klay Thompson, and Paul George.
Founded in 2021 by Stanford dorm-mates Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg, Wispr spent years on wearables and silent-speech interfaces before landing on Flow roughly two years ago, a cross-platform dictation tool now used by millions of consumers across more than 125,000 companies. The company reports four consecutive quarters of revenue growth exceeding 150 percent. Alongside the funding, Wispr launched Canto, its first proprietary speech recognition model, aimed at improving accuracy after users had reported quality issues with dictation output in recent weeks.
Menlo Ventures partner Matt Kraning framed the round around ambitions beyond dictation: users pay not to avoid typing but to avoid the text box entirely, a shift that puts Wispr against workflow tools, meeting-notes products, and eventually the input layer in front of every AI model. Wispr's newly launched meeting note-taker now competes directly with Granola, Fireflies, and Read AI, and the company opened a research lab in July under Ariya Rastrow to explore new voice-driven interfaces. The dictation category has also grown more crowded, with rivals including Willow, Monologue, Aqua, and Superwhisper, some offering free or lower-priced tools aimed at individual users.
