Wispr AI

Wispr AI is a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2021 by Tanay Kothari (CEO, formerly taught Stanford's Deep Learning course alongside Andrew Ng; named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023) and Sahaj Garg (CTO, previously the fifth employee and AI team lead at Luminous Computing).

The company's flagship product, Wispr Flow, is an AI voice keyboard that lets users press a configurable hotkey, dictate naturally into any app, and get clean polished text — with filler words removed, punctuation inferred, and formatting adapted to the active application. As of April 2026 it is the only major AI dictation product available on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android simultaneously.

Despite the name, Wispr Flow is a separate product from OpenAI's open-source Whisper ASR model. Wispr AI runs its own proprietary cloud models, with auxiliary calls into third-party clouds (including OpenAI and Meta) for some features. The company describes its long-term vision as building a "voice OS" — a layer between users and every app on the device, with the keyboard as a fallback rather than the default input.

Funding to date totals $361 million: a $30 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures (June 2025), a $25 million Series A extension led by Notable Capital (November 2025), and a $280 million Series B in August 2026, again led by Menlo Ventures, at a $2 billion valuation — roughly triple the $700 million the company carried before, less than ten months after the prior round. The company acquired Yapify AI in December 2025.

The Series B funds an expansion past the voice keyboard itself. Wispr has shipped a meeting note-taker that puts it against Granola and Fireflies, is pursuing hardware partnerships including the Oasis ring, and has stood up Wispr Interface Labs to explore new human-computer interaction models, staffed in part by people who worked on Amazon's early Alexa effort. The common bet is that voice becomes a primary input layer rather than an accessibility feature — a thesis the dictation product supports but has not yet proven at that scale.

In May 2026, Wispr told TechCrunch that India had become Wispr Flow's second-largest market by users, with month-over-month growth doubling after the launch of Hinglish voice support and Android availability. India still contributes only about 2% of revenue against roughly 14% of global downloads, prompting Wispr to introduce India-specific pricing at ₹320 (about $3.40 per month) for annual plans. CEO Tanay Kothari said the company plans to scale to 30 India-based employees within a year and eventually push the entry tier toward 10 to 20 cents per month to reach household users beyond knowledge workers. Two full-time linguistics PhDs lead the multilingual modeling work.