Wispr Bags $280 Mn at $2 Bn Valuation, Previews Canto Speech Model

Wispr, the artificial intelligence company behind AI dictation tool Wispr Flow, has raised $280 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation, led by long-time investor Menlo Ventures. The company said the round brings its total capital raised to $361 million.

“In a little over a year, voice has gone from something people were questioning to something they rely on, and it happened faster than we expected,” Tanay Kothari, Co-founder and CEO of Wispr, said in a statement. 

The company said the new funding will support investment in its products, research lab, models, and team. 

Existing investors Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures participated in the round. New investors include Acrew, Activate, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund and PLUS Capital, along with a select group of artists, athletes, and cultural leaders.

Wispr also previewed Canto, its first proprietary speech model. The company said the 2-billion-parameter model was built for conditions in which speech recognition is more difficult, including background noise, wind, heavy accents, and music.

Wispr said word error rates in the hardest conditions fall from more than 30% to between 5% and 10%. The company also expects Canto to reduce the number of dictations users need to edit by 30–35% across everyday use, according to Reuters. 

The model is also designed to handle multilingual speech, including situations where speakers switch between languages. Wispr used Hinglish as an example, saying speakers may switch between Hindi and English while expecting the resulting text in Roman script. The company said Canto can also use a user's dictionary and names to improve transcription.

Wispr said future versions of Canto will become larger and more capable, with each model intended to improve Flow's dictation. The company has not announced a general availability date for Canto.

Wispr said more than 60 billion words have been written with Flow, which is used by people at almost all Fortune 500 companies and more than 10,000 enterprises.

The company is also expanding beyond dictation. Wispr launched Flow Notetaker for meetings shortly before the Series B announcement and said it is building an intelligence layer for human-AI interaction, starting with voice and eventually extending to other modalities.

“If by the end of the year, the voice dictation platform is the only thing that Wispr has—it will probably die. We did something with Wispr once, and that is a playbook that we need to rise and repeat,” Kothari earlier told AIM.

The Series B follows Wispr's $30 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures in June 2025 and a $25 million Series A extension led by Notable Capital in November 2025. The November round brought total funding to $81 million and valued Wispr at $700 million, according to Reuters.

Kothari said Wispr's broader goal is to make voice a primary way of interacting with computers