Aug 17 (Reuters) – Wispr Flow said on Monday it had raised $280 million in a Series B funding round that valued the company at $2 billion, as investors bet on growing demand for AI-powered voice tools that help users write and work hands-free.
The round was led by existing investor Menlo Ventures and included current backers Notable Capital, NEA and Neo Ventures, among others. New investors included Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater and Peak XV.
The San Francisco-based Wispr Flow had previously raised $25 million in November last year in a round led by Notable Capital and backed by podcaster Steven Bartlett’s Flight Fund. The total funding has now reached $361 million.
Global venture capital is flowing increasingly toward AI, robotics and chip startups, fueling a surge in billion-dollar companies, faster follow-on rounds and sharply higher valuations for a select group of high-growth firms.
Wispr Flow, whose software converts speech into text for writing and workplace tasks, said people have now generated more than 60 billion words using its platform. The company said its products are used at nearly all Fortune 500 companies and more than 10,000 enterprises.
The company on Monday also unveiled a preview of Canto, its first proprietary speech-recognition model, which it said was designed for real-world conditions rather than quiet environments typically used to train and test voice systems.
“We built this model for where people actually use Flow. In the hardest conditions, with background noise, wind, heavy accents or music, error rates fall from more than 30% of words to somewhere between 5% and 10%,” CEO Tanay Kothari said in a blog post.
The CEO said much of the new funding would be directed toward improving transcription accuracy, a metric the company internally tracks through a “zero edit rate” target, or the share of spoken words that require no corrections.
(Reporting by Pragyan Kalita in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
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