ai-dictation
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Allan Guo
Allan Guo is the co-founder and CEO of Willow, a San Francisco AI voice-dictation app that lets you write anywhere on your computer by talking. A Stanford CS student who dropped out as a freshman to build a healthcare startup, he pivoted more than ten times before landing on voice as the interface. Willow, part of Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch, raised $4.2 million led by BoxGroup with backing from founders at Instacart, Shopify, HubSpot and Gusto. Guo's pitch is blunt: the keyboard is the last slow thing on a fast computer, and he intends to kill it.
New Lantern
New Lantern is a San Francisco startup building the first cloud-native, AI-native radiology platform. It folds worklist management, a browser-based PACS image viewer, and AI-powered draft reporting (its Curie engine, plus the NL-VOX speech model) into a single workspace, automating the tedious parts of a radiologist's day - measurements, segmentation, report drafting - so doctors can spend more time reading scans. Founded in 2021 by Shiva Suri after watching his radiologist mother fight clunky software during the pandemic, the company raised a $19M Series A led by Benchmark in November 2024 and aims to eventually automate up to 90% of imaging workflows, acting as an 'AI radiology resident.'
Wispr Flow
Wispr Flow is a San Francisco-based AI voice dictation platform that converts natural speech into polished, formatted text across any application at roughly 220 words per minute - about 4x faster than typing. Built by two Stanford AI researchers, the company has quietly become the voice layer that 270 Fortune 500 companies rely on, combining a 10% word error rate (vs. 27% for OpenAI Whisper), 100+ language support, and context-aware formatting that automatically adjusts tone and style based on the active app. With $81M raised and a $700M valuation as of late 2025, Wispr Flow is racing to become the default voice-first operating system for a billion users.