Meet the DPS student inspired by Iron Man to build Jarvis, went on to create a voice-AI company that just raised ₹221 crore

Wispr Flow, the voice-first AI company founded by serial entrepreneur Tanay Kothari, has raised another $25 million after the startup grew its ARR tenfold in just five months. 

Background

Tanay Kothari, now Co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, traces the genesis of his entrepreneurial arc back to a night in 2008 when, as a 10-year-old student at Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram, he watched Iron Man and became obsessed with building “Jarvis.” 

With only one hour of screen time at home, throughout the night, he used to secretly code, sleeping every alternate day during middle and high school. 

By the time he was 12, he had built more than 50 apps-and even got a cease-and-desist notice from Google.

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Achievements

By 16, Tanay Kothari was already something of a prodigy. 

• He was coding in more than 20 programming languages, 

• Had authored research on early-stage cancer detection using image scans, 

• Led multinational engineering teams in a NASA space settlement project,

• Medaled at global Olympiads. 

He also had a perfect 36/36 on the ACT and top rankings at DPS. He also developed five consumer apps and founded Proximity, a social-travel platform he built based on observing his father constantly miss opportunities to meet friends while traveling.

Today, Wispr Flow represents the culmination of that early obsession: building technology that understands humans the way humans understand each other. 

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What is Wispr Flow?  

Backed by a total of $81 million-including the latest round led by Hans Tung of Notable Capital, with participation from entrepreneur Steven Barlett, Tanay’s company, Wispr, has emerged as a leader in AI voice interfaces. 

According to its internal benchmarks, the product is 3-4x more accurate than OpenAI, ElevenLabs, and Siri.  

we just raised another $25M after 10x'ing our ARR in 5 months. the crazy part is this almost never happened.

17 years ago, I watched Iron Man as a 10-year-old kid in Delhi. that night, I pulled my first all-nighter teaching myself to code. not because I wanted to build apps or… pic.twitter.com/NsVf8RtYRf

— Tanay Kothari (@tankots) November 20, 2025

How it operates? 

Wispr Flow is touted to be the fastest and most reliable, AI-powered voice dictation application for Mac, Windows, and iOS that converts natural speech into polished, formatted text across virtually any application. Tanay claims it is 3 to 4 times more accurate than Siri and Eleven Labs. 

Unlike basic voice-to-text, it uses intelligent AI models to automatically clean up speech (even actual whispers), add punctuation, adjust tone and context, and even perform edits via voice commands, significantly increasing productivity.

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User base

Its user base is strong as well, with 70% retention after 12 months and teams across 270 Fortune 500 companies using it daily. Amazon, Meta, Netflix, and Uber are some of its clientele.

Tanay Kothari calls the breakthrough not transcription but true understanding: users now hit “send” in less than half a second without checking outputs. With voice input solved, Wispr Flow is now building the next layer, which is an assistant that doesn’t just listen, but acts.

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