Girish Mathrubootham, co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Freshworks, has thrown his weight behind the voice-first artificial intelligence ecosystem through his early-stage venture capital firm, Together Fund.

Together Fund has participated in the $280 million Series B funding round for San Francisco-headquartered startup Wispr, which was led by Menlo Ventures at a $2 billion valuation. Wispr, founded by Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg, is pioneering voice-native interfaces designed to replace traditional keyboard inputs with continuous, contextual speech recognition.

Explaining the firm’s strategic rationale, Together Fund noted that while it typically operates as a seed-stage investor across the US-India corridor, the decision to back Wispr’s growth-stage round offers a valuable front-row seat to how a voice-first application scales from consumer adoption into enterprise software.

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Speaking is roughly three times faster than typing, offering a far more expressive interface as generative AI models mature.

“But speed is only half the story. When people speak, they give more context, more nuance, more of themselves. Text interfaces are restrictive by design; voice is expansive. For the first time, the interface is adapting to the human instead of the other way around,” Together Fund said in a blog post.

Wispr’s flagship product, Wispr Flow, auto-formats dictation, removes filler words, and adapts to individual user vocabulary. The company recently previewed its proprietary speech model, Canto, which aims to minimise word error rates in noisy environments and lower user edit frequency by 30% to 35%.

For Mathrubootham and Together Fund, the investment also presents a massive opportunity within India, which has already emerged as a top three organic market for Wispr. With a mobile-first, highly multilingual internet base of nearly 900 million users, where non-English voice input accounts for approximately 60% of dictation, India serves as a key proving ground for voice-first computing.

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“And there’s a reason this matters especially to us at Together: India is already a top-3 organic market for Wispr. It’s the perfect proving ground for voice-first computing: a massive, mobile-first, deeply multilingual internet population of nearly 900 million that already relies on voice more than almost anywhere on earth (~60% of Wispr’s dictation is non-English). What works for the next billion users often gets built for India first. We intend to help Wispr win there,” the company said.