Wispr, a startup known for its AI dictation tool, raised $280 million in Series B funding, led by Menlo Ventures, at a $2 billion valuation, the company announced on Monday. The funds will allow Wispr to increase its footprint as it ventures into new areas, such as meetings, with its newly released note-taker tool. The new capital comes at a time when there is increased competition in the dictation space from apps like Willow, Monologue, Aqua, and Superwhisper, among others. In addition, several developers are creating free or lower-priced tools for prosumers. Existing investors, including Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC, and MVP Ventures, doubled down in the latest round. The company also gained new investors such as Acrew, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund, and PLUS Capital. Alongside the funding news, Wispr announced it's launching a new model to improve the quality of speech understanding. For the last few weeks, several users have complained about a quality dip in Wispr Flow's dictation output. The company said its new model, called Canto, will reduce error rates from 30% to less than 10%....

The lowest prices for TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 end this Friday, August 21 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Once that window closes, your chance to save up to $300 on your pass, or get an even larger discount on group pricing, will come to an end. If you've been circling around Disrupt, then now's the best time to lock in your pass and start getting ready to join the rest of the startup community gathering in San Francisco from October 13-15 at Moscone West! Each year, TechCrunch Disrupt brings together more than 10,000 founders, investors, and startup community members, driving innovation forward. And for our event this year, you'll find a keen focus on building and developing in the AI era across all of our stages of programming. If you want to be on the cutting edge running into 2027, this is the event for you. And you don't have to be a founder to get value out of Disrupt. Whether you're raising capital, scouting investments, hiring talent, launching a startup, or building strategic partnerships, Disrupt puts you in the middle of the conversations shaping what's next and can help you make the connections that propel your next year of growth....

Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool that was launched in 2021 with the goal of becoming the new Zapier, is shutting down, and some of its staff ' including its top executive ' are joining Google's Chrome team. Jacob Bank, Relay's founder and CEO, shared a company announcement Monday that reveals the app will be shutting down access for paying customers on September 14. Free customers would have already lost access as of August 15. The app's closure was initially announced in July. Bank, who previously spent a little over six years at Google, revealed that he would now be rejoining the tech giant as VP of Product for Google Chrome, where he will lead the product and developer relations teams for Chrome, according to his LinkedIn. 'I've spent my whole career doing one thing: building tools that help people get more done with AI, without sacrificing their personal creativity or insights,' said Bank in a post on X. 'And joining the Chrome team is an ideal opportunity to bring those experiences to many, many more people.'...

Anyone with a stock portfolio has invariably noticed that semiconductor companies are on a tear this year. Massive AI spending has helped push earnings and valuations for industry leaders to record levels. In turn, semiconductor giants are investing record sums in startups. So far this year, the sector's most valuable companies have participated in rounds collectively valued at over $250 billion, per Crunchbase data. That's multiples above prior high marks. Large cap chip companies are also leading and co-leading some of the biggest financings. This includes OpenAI's record-breaking $122 billion March funding round, in which Nvidia was one of eight lead investors. Still, there are plenty of other big rounds with semiconductor backing this year that, by any other comparative benchmark, would also be considered enormous. Take July's $5 billion corporate financing from Nvidia for foundational AI startup Safe Superintelligence. It should surprise no one that Nvidia is the most active and highest spending corporate investor in the semiconductor space. The AI chip architect has participated in a record 59 known funding rounds so far this year, per Crunchbase data, up from 53 in all of 2025....