Ex-Plaud exec raises $26M for AI app that listens all day

Ambi, a startup founded by former Plaud executive Peter Mo, has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds to build an AI app designed to listen to users continuously and surface real-time suggestions and insights. The round was led by Luminous Ventures, which has backed companies including Meituan and Unitree Robotics, with participation from original design manufacturer (ODM) Huaqin, the company said Monday.

Ambi is releasing apps for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch that work like meeting note-takers, but users can choose to leave them listening so the app captures context throughout the day. Mo, Ambi’s co-founder and CEO, said the company wants its AI agent to start acting during a meeting itself — surfacing suggestions and relevant knowledge in real time based on a user’s calendar, meetings, knowledge base and web data, rather than only summarizing after the call ends. Users can also start a task on one device and continue it on another.

Mo said the way people currently interact with intelligence is limited: with hardware like Plaud, users must wait for a recording to transfer to the phone and upload to the cloud before getting any insight. Ambi, he said, is built to make AI usable anytime and anywhere instead.

The startup’s ambitions extend further. An upcoming desktop app will look at the work users do and store important parts in memory for more personalized suggestions, similar to apps like Littlebird and Minimi. Ambi is also planning to launch its own hardware device with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones to capture context and display information.

The always-listening approach raises privacy questions that have already tripped up other companies — some meeting note-takers have even been sued because their tech recorded people’s conversations and data without their consent. Mo said ambient data capture is off by default and users can turn it off at any time, and that Ambi does not store recordings of users and encrypts the data, though he did not specify what kind of encryption. He said the responsibility for disclosing ambient capture to third parties still falls on users, and called it an unsolved, industry-wide problem: “We have tried to put the information about disclosure in every place possible, but if users try to hide the capture, we can’t just solve the problem.”

Ambi has more than 50 staff across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and is hiring for go-to-market roles and AI engineers working on speech recognition models.

Why it matters

Ambi is betting that always-on listening is worth the privacy trade-off for personalized AI assistance — but by Mo’s own admission, the industry still hasn’t solved how to disclose that capture to the people around the user, a gap that lawsuits against other meeting-note startups suggest could become Ambi’s problem too.