Willow is a beautiful, powerful new app that’s changing the way you type in iOS apps. It allows them to control their messages and quickly and conveniently change them at the last minute. Former Stanford students Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu started this exciting new platform. We want it to be useful for casual users and serious knowledge workers alike—those who are out there looking for new, more efficient ways to communicate. Following its recent success, Willow is riding a huge wave of investment and on the cusp of rapid expansion.
Willow has continued to double in user adoption every month since launch with consistent 50% month-over-month user growth. With the app currently available in more than 100 languages, it is providing a unique resource to audiences of all backgrounds around the world. This multilingual support expands its accessibility and usability for people across an array of disciplines, from business experts to academia.
Willow has an additional special feature here, which is that users can input their own vocabulary terms. It encourages them to write unique tones as appropriate to each category of apps, such as productivity, chat and email. Willow differs from Wispr Flow by providing a complete keyboard experience. This is to enable deeper and richer typing experiences beyond the numeric pad of Wispr Flow. This design decision allows users to easily transition between dictation and traditional typing.
Guo saw particular demand for a voice AI tool that serves both knowledge workers and casual users. This insight inspired the creation of Willow. He summed up this idea in a quote to TechCrunch, discussing how important it will be to design an experience that makes communication easy.
“I was really impressed with Allan’s vision around not just creating a great dictation app but, long term, aiming for creating an interface that can control your computer.” – Max Mullen, Instacart co-founder and angel investor
Willow is always jotting down your one-on-one, spoken voice input. It then dynamically formats that message based on the context of where it’s being used. This translates to the fact that users edit their messages less than with other dictation systems. Mullen observed that the need for editing after dictating is greatly minimized when using Willow, which reinforces the productivity lassoing power of this app.
Willow has garnered $4.5 million in funding from notable investors including Box Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, and several angel investors. Guo and Liu originally entered Y Combinator’s program in the summer of 2024 with another team. Having gone through the process of discovering that their original healthcare concept wasn’t resonating with the market, they shifted gears and redirected their efforts toward Willow.
Willow is preparing for some exciting expansion! In the next few months the company intends to extend their platform to Windows and Android. The founders plan to improve their personalization features even more to reduce the need for users to do manual edits after dictation. This expansion will put Willow’s user-friendly features into the hands of millions more users across multiple operating systems.
