Wispr Raises $280M Series B and Previews Canto, Its First In-House Speech Model

Wispr, maker of the Flow voice dictation app, announced a $280 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation on August 17, 2026, led by Menlo Ventures. Alongside it, the company previewed Canto, its first proprietary speech model, citing word error rates falling from over 30% to 5-10% in the hardest conditions.

Wispr voice-AI speech-recognition funding productivity

Wispr, the company behind the Flow voice dictation app, announced on August 17, 2026 that it raised $280 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation. The round was led by existing investor Menlo Ventures and brings total capital raised to $361 million¹.

Announced alongside the funding was a preview of Canto, the company’s first proprietary speech model¹. Wispr’s argument is that most speech models are trained and evaluated on clean recordings made in a quiet room, while actual use happens in cars, on streets, and in open offices¹. By the company’s own measurements, in the hardest conditions — background noise, wind, heavy accents, or music — word error rates fall from more than 30% to somewhere between 5 and 10%, and across everyday use it expects to reduce the number of dictations needing edits by 30 to 35%¹. Wispr says more than 60 billion words have now been written with Flow, which is used by people at almost all of the Fortune 500 companies and over 10,000 enterprises¹.