Wispr raises $280M led by Menlo Ventures at a $2B valuation

Wispr just raised $280 million at a $2 billion valuation, less than ten months after a $25 million round. Menlo Ventures led the equity Series B into the voice dictation company. TechCrunch and Fortune both reported the close.

The new check is 11 times the entire prior raise from Notable Capital. Neither story names the last valuation, so a multiple on price is a guess. What is on the record is $361 million raised across the company's life against a $2 billion mark. Paid-in capital is about 18% of the current price.

Existing backers Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC and MVP Ventures all put in again. New money came from Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund and PLUS Capital. A group of athletes also invested, including Joe Burrow, Shaun White, Klay Thompson and Paul George.

Wispr also shipped a new speech model called Canto, after users complained that dictation quality had slipped. TechCrunch says Canto cuts the error rate from 30% to less than 10%, a roughly two-thirds drop, from one wrong word in three to fewer than one in ten. An error rate under 10% is still an error rate. Dictation remains a draft that needs a read-through.

The stated plan is to move past dictation into meetings with a newly released notetaker, expand go-to-market in India and the UK, chase hardware partnerships including the Oasis ring, and stand up an exploratory effort called Interface Labs. Products today are Wispr Flow, now on Android, plus the notetaker.

Fortune reports revenue growing north of 150% for four consecutive quarters, across millions of consumers and 100,000 businesses. Sustained 150%-plus growth implies revenue roughly two and a half times where it stood a year ago. No absolute revenue figure was disclosed, so the $2 billion valuation cannot be checked against a multiple.

The competitive set Wispr names is Apple, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, each of which ships or is building voice input as a feature rather than a product.

Co-founder Sahaj Garg put the defensibility argument on privacy: "Privacy and security aren't features for us: They're the foundation for earning ambient access to your life." On automation, he drew a line: "These systems can consult for you, but you should still supply your intent." Co-founder Tanay Kothari framed the origin: "When Sahaj and I were talking about the biggest problems we wanted to solve, one of the things that came up was what it means to have a world where AI is prevalent."

A $2 billion company had a quality regression in the one feature it is valued for. Canto is the fix.