Voice AI startup Wispr has secured $25 million in funding from Notable Capital as its dictation app, Flow, gains momentum among both consumers and enterprise users. The investment brings veteran investor Hans Tung on board as a board observer and will be utilized to accelerate hiring, enhance speech modeling, and expand the platform more rapidly, according to the company.
Strong Traction Driving Workplace Transformation
Wispr reports that after three or more months of usage, people are now writing over 50% of their text via Flow on average. Since June, user engagement has surged by approximately 40% month-over-month, fueling a nearly 100-fold annual growth in the user base with a solid 70% retention rate over 12 months.
On the enterprise front, Wispr has made significant inroads, with 270 of the Fortune 500 companies incorporating Flow and 125 companies officially becoming customers. This footprint suggests that voice input is evolving from a niche productivity tool to a core component of knowledge worker workflows.
Overcoming Early User Challenges
Wispr did encounter a learning curve as less tech-savvy users began adopting the app. Many users initially tried dictating only within the app and were unaware that Flow worked seamlessly across other phone applications, leading to churn. To address this, Wispr introduced a new onboarding flow that guides users to set up dictation across their preferred apps, resulting in a marked increase in user activation and dictation launches.
Industry analysts from Gartner and IDC have identified voice interfaces as an increasingly vital input modality in productivity suites. Wispr’s unique metric of “share of characters” effectively quantifies how users are transitioning from initial downloads to sustained habitual use.
Why Notable Capital Is Investing in Wispr
Wispr’s leadership revealed that Notable Capital’s investment followed rigorous due diligence, including competitor analysis and product teardowns. Hans Tung—whose investment portfolio includes Affirm, Airbnb, Slack, Coinbase, Anthropic, and TikTok—joins as a board observer, signaling strong confidence in Wispr’s potential as a multiplatform voice interface.
This investment aligns with the broader venture trend favoring distribution-first AI products. Similar to how Grammarly became the default writing layer embedded in every text field, Wispr aims to be the ambient voice layer across all applications where text is produced.
Technical Edge and Product Roadmap
Accuracy remains the critical battleground. Wispr claims an average error rate of about 10%, significantly outperforming OpenAI’s Whisper at 27% and Apple’s transcription at 47% in internal tests. While word error rate remains the industry standard metric, factors like time-to-correct errors and personalization play a more crucial role in professional settings, where less editing translates to faster output.
Wispr plans to deliver customized speech recognition trained on individual users’ voices, jargon, and writing styles. Flow currently supports Windows, Mac, and iOS, with an Android beta expected by year-end and a stable release targeted for Q1 2025.
Some actions or Siri Shortcuts occasionally introduced variability in dictation, named things like Draft Email or Reply to Email, making the experience less predictable. The roadmap targets evolving beyond simple dictation toward co-piloting users’ AI assistants. Wispr is testing a private API with key enterprise and hardware partners and aims to open broader developer access next year.
Competitive Voice AI Landscape
The voice AI and dictation space is rapidly becoming crowded. YC-backed startups like Willow and Aqua, Every ecosystem’s Monologue, and tools such as Typeless, Talktastic, Superwhisper, and Betterdictation are competing for users’ attention. Meanwhile, major platforms like Apple, Google, and Microsoft enhance native voice features, while model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic push toward end-to-end speech pipelines.
Success in this field will depend on accuracy across diverse accents and specialized vocabularies, low latency, strong privacy protections, and seamless cross-application integration. Human-Computer Interaction researchers at institutions like Stanford and MIT have long advocated that the ideal interface is one users scarcely notice—a philosophy Wispr strongly embraces.
Impact of the New Funding
The new funding will support Wispr’s efforts to recruit top machine learning and speech technology talent who might otherwise be drawn to OpenAI or Anthropic. It will also fuel national scaling and development of enterprise-grade features. Should Flow consistently capture more than 50% of a user’s text input, it could establish a powerful behavioral moat, creating switching costs through habit rather than contracts.
Key Upcoming Milestones to Watch
- Android app rollout
- Launch of an open API
- Enterprise case studies demonstrating productivity improvements
- Advances in personalization reducing post-dictation editing
If Wispr maintains high adoption, low error rates, and minimal latency, it is well-positioned to dominate the voice-to-text input layer across the modern workplace.
