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Wispr AI is a startup developing a new form of personal computing based on neural interfaces. Wispr's product aims to challenge smartphones by offering new ways for users to interact with technology. Wispr uses neuromuscular interfaces to capture bio-signals for intent recognition. Wispr cofounder and CEO, Tanay Kothari, described the company's product:
We're designing a way to interact with technology by tapping into the ways that humans most naturally interact with one another. We call these interfaces natural interfaces, which are non-invasive neural interfaces that read biosignals from your body, versus most other neural interfaces, which read signals from the brain.
While capturing a user's thoughts requires a direct interface with the brain, Wispr aims to capture deliberate intentions from the rest of the body. Examples of this provided by the company include electrical signals sent from the brain to muscles in the body that are captured using electromyography. Therefore, sensors like EKGs (electrocardiograms) would enable the company to capture deliberate thoughts with a piece of wearable tech that is non-invasive and comfortable for the user to wear.
Wispr was founded in 2021 by Tanay Kothari (CEO) and Sahaj Garg (CTO). Kothari previously started FeatherX, a tool for personalizing e-commerce experiences that was bought by Cerebra, where he would go on to lead engineering and product. Kothari is an International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) medalist and previously worked on developing personal assistants. He studied computer science at Stanford, where he published research with Andrew Ng at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).
To build a successful consumer product, Wispr aims to solve a number of engineering and design challenges, including developing technology that works regardless of user and environment. Following the second seed round, Sahaj Garg, Wispr cofounder and CTO, described how the funding will help the company continue developing its technology:
The challenge with building any new technology is that you can get it to work with some effort on one person in a constrained lab setting. A lot of companies building cutting-edge technology fall into this trap with products that never see the light of day... This new round of funding lets us test our system with hundreds of people from varying demographics and ensure that it works reliably and intuitively.
On December 1, 2021, Wispr announced a $4.6 million seed round led by NEA and 8VC with participation from angel investors, including Ben Jones (COO of CTRL-Labs), Josh Duyan (CSO and cofounder of CTRL-Labs), Jose Carmena (co-CEO of iota Biosciences & former Berkeley Neuroscience Professor), Will Ahmed (CEO of Whoop) Dave Gilboa (CEO of Warby Parker), Chris Manning (Stanford NLP Professor and Investment Partner at AIX Ventures), and Matt Kraning (CTO of Expanse).
On October 24, 2022, Wispr announced another $10 million in equity and debt as part of a second seed round. Major investors in the round included Neo, Triple Point Capital, MVP Ventures, and Fred Ehrsam, the cofounder of Coinbase and Paradigm Ventures. Previous investors, including New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and 8VC, also increased their ownership in the company, and Wispr brought on new angel investors, such as Tom Oxley (CEO of the neurotech startup, Synchron), and Arash Ferdowsi (cofounder and CTO of Dropbox).
