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Wispr, an artificial intelligence-powered speech recognition company, has secured $280 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation. The funding round was led by Menlo Ventures and brings the company’s total capital raised to over $361 million since its inception. This latest investment comes less than a year after the startup’s previous funding round, signaling strong investor confidence in the company’s trajectory.
The fresh capital will enable Wispr to expand beyond its core dictation product into adjacent markets. The company recently launched a note-taking tool for meetings, positioning itself to compete with established players in that space. Additionally, Wispr introduced a new speech recognition model called Canto designed to significantly improve accuracy, reducing error rates from 30 percent to below 10 percent—a response to recent user complaints about declining dictation quality.
Wispr faces mounting competition in the voice-to-text market from numerous rivals, including Willow, Monologue, and Aqua. The company has responded by expanding geographically, launching on Android and establishing teams in markets such as India and the United Kingdom. Strategic partnerships with hardware manufacturers like the Oasis ring aim to make voice input more accessible to users in different contexts.
The company has also established Wispr Interface Labs under leadership from an early Amazon Alexa engineer, focusing on developing innovative human-computer interaction interfaces. Both new and existing investors participated in the funding round, including NEA, Notable Capital, and newly added backers such as Acrew and Forerunner.
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Originally reported by Techcrunch →
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