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AI startups Wispr and Higgsfield raise $680M in combined funding

Wispr and Higgsfield announced $280M and $400M rounds on Monday to expand AI speech and video platforms.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-18 05:40

Wispr's round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from existing investors Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC and MVP Ventures. New investors included Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund and PLUS Capital. The company said the funding brings its total raised to $361 million. Wispr's main product, Flow, integrates into applications and lets users dictate naturally into any text field. It cleans up filler words, grammar and misspoken language to produce polished prose for emails, memos and documents.

Alongside the funding, Wispr announced a preview of Canto, its first proprietary AI model. According to Wispr, Canto was trained to recognize speech in noisy environments with background voices, traffic, barking dogs and other interruptions. The company said most voice models rely on clean voice data, while Canto was given examples that allow it to isolate human voices from environmental noise. When Canto is built into Flow, Wispr said the error rate in noisy settings drops from 30% to between 5% and 10%.

Wispr said users have written more than 60 billion words on Flow, and that the product has been used by almost all of the Fortune 500 and more than 10,000 enterprises. "I use Flow every day," said Domantas Sabonis, three-time NBA All-Star, in a statement provided by Wispr. "I grew up rotating between English, Spanish and Lithuanian, and it keeps up with me no matter which one I'm speaking." Wispr also noted that the deaf and hard-of-hearing community uses AI transcription, and that advances in cloud models help drive the industry forward.

Higgsfield's Series B was led by DST Global, with participation from Tribe Capital, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Smash Capital, Fifth Wall, Valor Capital, Intel Capital and more than half a dozen existing investors. The company, founded in 2023 by former Snap executive Alex Mashrabov, offers tools for creating AI images and videos, including Cinema Studio for filmmakers and Marketing Studio for marketing teams. It also launched Supercomputer in May, an agentic AI product that automates workflows; the company said agentic tool use on the platform increased 42-fold in three months, resulting in more than 20 million content generations per month.

Higgsfield said it serves more than 30 million users globally and counts hundreds of Fortune 500 companies among its customers. There are slight discrepancies in the figures reported by two outlets that covered the announcement. TechCrunch reported $700 million in annualized revenue, 30 million users across 200 countries and 390 Fortune 500 customers. SiliconANGLE reported 30 million users across 238 countries and territories and 360 Fortune 500 customers. The company said the United States is its largest market.

Mashrabov told TechCrunch that the fresh capital will fund hiring, product development and compute capacity. "Video is one of the most compute-intensive domains in AI," he said. "Just one minute of video is like processing 60,000 words." He noted that securing reliable compute is necessary to compete with companies such as Synthesia and Runway.