Wispr announced a $280 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures that values the company at $2 billion. With the new financing, Wispr said it has raised $361 million in total and plans to use the capital to expand its footprint and move beyond core dictation into meeting-focused products.
Funding, investors and competitive landscape
Existing backers including Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC and MVP Ventures participated again, while new investors such as Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund and PLUS Capital joined the round. The last financing occurred less than ten months ago.
The dictation market has grown more crowded, with apps such as Willow, Monologue, Aqua and Superwhisper offering alternatives, and several developers producing lower-priced or free tools aimed at prosumers, the company noted.
Products, model update and expansion moves
Alongside the funding announcement, Wispr introduced a new speech model named Canto. The company said Canto will cut error rates in Wispr Flow dictation from about 30% to below 10%, addressing recent user reports of a dip in transcription quality.
Since last November, Wispr released its dictation app on Android and has grown go-to-market teams in regions such as India and the U.K. It also reported partnerships with hardware makers like the Oasis ring to enable quieter or more private dictation on devices.
Wispr has also released a meeting notetaker that can display summaries and action items. The startup is entering a space with rivals including Granola, Fireflies and Read AI; the notetaker currently shows summaries and action items, and there is potential for integrations that would allow it to update other tools or generate documents and email drafts.
Last month the company launched Wispr Interface Labs under Ariya Rastrow, who previously worked on Amazon Alexa; the lab will explore new interfaces for human-computer interaction, the company said.
Wispr stated the new proceeds will support product development and geographic expansion as it seeks to broaden use cases beyond dictation.
Original source: TechCrunch AI