Peak XV Partners, Together Fund Join Voice AI Unicorn Wispr Flow’s Cap Table

Prominent Indian startup investors — VC firm Peak XV Partners, Girish Mathrubootham-led Together Fund and Aakrit Vaish’s Activate — have acquired stakes in US-based voice AI unicorn Wispr Flow. 

The aforementioned investors participated in the startup’s $280 Mn Series B round, which catapulted its valuation to $2 Bn. While US-based Menlo Ventures led the round, other existing and new investors Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, MVP Ventures, Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, and PLUS Capital, also participated in the round. 

Founded in 2021 by Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg, the San Francisco-based startup builds AI-powered speech-to-text software. It has recently partnered with hardware makers to equip their devices with its dictation tools, and is expanding into workplace tasks.

The startup also announced its first proprietary speech-to-text model named Canto, designed for users recording conversations in noisy environments alongside disclosing the Series B round. Wispr Flow expects Canto to reduce the word error rate of its software by over 4X, from over 30% down to 5-10%. 

Backing the US-based startup, Peak XV Partners added to its strategy of widening its portfolio by backing AI startups targeting the American market. Earlier this month, the VC firm led the $45 Mn Series B funding round of San Francisco-based AI code testing startup Blacksmith at a valuation of $550 Mn. 

Since separating from Sequoia Capital in 2023, the firm has hired operating partners in the US including Arnav Sahu, a former Y Combinator investor, and opened an office in San Francisco. 

It has also backed US startups like AI voice platform Vapi, AI memory infrastructure startup Mem0, AI sales training platform Hyperbound, and product development platform PostHog.

Beyond Peak XV’s growing US interest, it is also interesting to note that Together Fund has stepped away from its traditional approach of backing early-stage / seed startups and backed a growth stage firm. 

In a blog post, the firm said that entering a Series B funding round doesn’t fit its typical modus operandi but its team had wanted to build alongside Wispr Flow’s founders for the past two years. 

Together further added that it was looking to gain direct insight into how the voice AI platform would scale from consumer scale to enterprise scale. 

This would help its own team learn how to make the right bets in the voice AI space, which the firm described as “a category we believe will define the next decade of computing”. 

The latest round marks the entry of Activate, a relatively new AI-focussed VC fund started by Aakrit Vaish and ex-Together Fund partner Pratyush Choudhary. Vaish, an advisor to the India AI Mission, earlier founded enterprise voice AI startup Haptik, which was acquired by Reliance Jio. 

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