Wispr is the San Francisco AI startup behind Wispr Flow, a voice-to-text dictation product used by professionals at companies including NVIDIA and Amazon. The product transcribes natural speech into polished, context-aware writing across any application — email, Slack, code editors, browsers, and word processors — with no special syntax, wake word, or command grammar required. Users press a hotkey, speak, and clean, formatted text is inserted at the cursor.
The company was founded in 2021 by CEO Tanay Kothari and co-founder Sahaj Garg, who both studied computer science at Stanford. Kothari previously taught Stanford's CS230 deep learning course as a teaching assistant alongside Andrew Ng. The original Wispr concept was a neural interface, but the team pivoted into ambient voice software and shipped Wispr Flow as the consumer-prosumer entry point.
Wispr has raised $81M in disclosed funding to date. In June 2025, the company closed a $30M round led by Menlo Ventures, followed by a $25M round led by Notable Capital in November 2025 at a roughly $700M valuation. In May 2026, Bloomberg and TechCrunch reported that the company was in late-stage talks to raise approximately $260M in a Menlo Ventures-led Series B at a valuation of around $2B.
Wispr Flow's growth has come largely from a viral consumer-prosumer wedge: knowledge workers replacing keyboard input with voice for everything from longer emails to drafting docs. The product is available on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, with an Android app launched in early 2026. Differentiation centers on accuracy on natural, unscripted speech; cleanup of filler words; and context-aware formatting that adapts to the destination app.
The company has signaled that dictation is a starting point, not the end state — the longer roadmap is a broader AI voice productivity layer that handles commands, agents, and ambient workflows. Wispr competes with Apple Dictation, Whisper-based tools, Otter, and emerging voice-first AI startups, but its bet is that purpose-built design plus a strong consumer growth engine will let it cross from dictation tool to default voice input.