Aug 17 (Reuters) - AI startup Wispr Flow has nearly tripled its valuation to $2 billion in nine months, underscoring investor enthusiasm for voice tools that let users work and write hands-free.
The AI dictation company said on Monday it has raised $280 million in a Series B round, led by existing investor Menlo Ventures and including current backers Notable Capital, NEA and Neo Ventures. New investors included Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater and Peak XV.
The San Francisco-based Wispr had raised $25 million in a Series A extension round in November last year at a $700 million valuation. The total funding has now reached $361 million.
Global venture capital is flowing increasingly toward AI, robotics and chip startups, fueling a surge in billion-dollar companies, faster follow-on rounds and sharply higher valuations for a select group of high-growth firms.
Wispr Flow, whose software converts speech into text for writing and workplace tasks, said its products are used at more than 10,000 enterprises.
"The value may be there if the growth rate survives, since triple digit quarterly growth off a small base is the easiest number in venture capital to generate for a few quarters and the hardest one to keep producing once the early adopters stop being the entire customer base," said Michael Ashley Schulman, partner at Cerity Partners.
The company on Monday also unveiled a preview of Canto, its first proprietary speech-recognition model.
"We built this model for where people actually use Flow. In the hardest conditions, with background noise, wind, heavy accents or music, error rates fall from more than 30% of words to somewhere between 5% and 10%," CEO Tanay Kothari said in a blog post.
(Reporting by Pragyan Kalita in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)
