Wispr Flow

Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg founded Wispr as CEO and CTO respectively. Both had studied and conducted AI research at Stanford. Kothari’s earlier startup FeatherX was acquired by Cerebra Technologies, while Garg had led the AI team at Luminous Computing. NEA’s portfolio record dates its first seed investment to 2021.⁠[1][2][3]

In a later first-person account, Kothari described Wispr’s early work on a wearable for silent-speech input, with Flow initially serving as its software layer. The team stopped hardware development on July 18, 2024, focused on voice dictation and promoted the desktop product that autumn. He said the transition reduced the team from about forty people to five.⁠[4][5]

Wispr extended Flow from desktop to iOS for writing, editing and text input by voice on a phone. Its June 24 announcement said the app had launched earlier that month. The product targets voice input across applications rather than use confined to a standalone chat window.⁠[5]

Wispr announced a $30 million Series A, bringing total funding at the time to $56 million. Menlo Ventures’ Matt Kraning led the round and joined the board, with continued backing from NEA, 8VC, Neo and MVP and participation from individual founders. Planned uses included hiring, Android expansion and enterprise features.⁠[5]

Wispr announced $25 million in additional funding led by Notable Capital, with Steven Bartlett’s Flight Fund participating, bringing its then-total funding to $81 million. Notable’s Hans Tung joined the board. The announcement emphasized enterprise teams, proprietary models, latency, multilingual use and personalized voice interaction.⁠[6]

Wispr established its Advanced Interfaces Lab under chief scientist Ariya Rastrow. Menlo’s subsequent account described research into combining speech and a user’s working context to translate intent into actions, workflows or task-specific interfaces. This is a research direction rather than evidence that every proposed capability is already generally available.⁠[7]

Wispr introduced Notetaker with live transcription, post-meeting summaries, decisions and action items, and questions linked to original records. It uses a personal dictionary and context from connected applications and can expose meeting records to tools such as Claude and ChatGPT through MCP. It was the company’s first product beyond dictation.⁠[8]

Wispr announced a $280 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, naming Menlo Ventures and returning investor Notable Capital as leaders, with PLUS Capital also joining. It previewed its first proprietary speech model for noisy conditions, mixed-language speech and personal vocabulary, emphasizing the proportion of dictations needing no edits. Reported performance improvements were company tests and expectations.⁠[9]

Following its Mac release, Wispr launched Notetaker on Windows and announced transcription in twenty-one languages. It captures computer audio without adding a meeting bot. Administrators can control availability and privacy restrictions, and recording displays a consent reminder. Windows Notetaker has higher hardware requirements than basic dictation.⁠[10][11]

Flow converts speech into edited text, with filler removal, sentence organization and formatting. Dictation is available on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android, with platform-specific microphone, accessibility and operating-system requirements. Its uses include writing, workplace communication and developer input, in addition to meeting transcription.⁠[2][11]

Wispr’s data-controls page states that transcription runs in the cloud. Users can control whether audio, transcripts and edits may improve Wispr’s models, separately from dictation cloud storage. Enterprise accounts disable that sharing. Notetaker has its own storage and retention settings, so dictation privacy choices do not imply that all meeting data is discarded.⁠[12]

Website: https://wisprflow.ai/ (opens in a new window). X: https://x.com/WisprFlow (opens in a new window). LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wisprflow/ (opens in a new window). YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: https://www.youtube.com/@wisprflow (opens in a new window).⁠[13][14][15][16]