Ex-Plaud executive Peter Mo raises $26M for Ambi, an AI app that listens in the background

Ambi, a startup founded by former Plaud executive Peter Mo, said on Monday it has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds. The rounds were led by Luminous Ventures — an investor that has backed companies including Meituan and Unitree Robotics — together with Original Design Manufacturer Huaqin.

Alongside the funding, Ambi is releasing apps for iPhones, Macs and Apple Watch. The apps work like meeting note-takers, but users can leave them listening so the software captures context all day long.

The company's differentiator is timing. Meeting note-taking tools have largely automated the work that happens after a call — summaries and action items generated from what was said, piped through connectors into other software. Ambi wants its agent to start that work during the meeting itself.

Ambi says its AI agent can proactively surface suggestions or relevant knowledge while a user is in a meeting, drawing on their calendar, meetings, knowledge base and web data. Users can also begin a task on one device and continue it on another.

“The way we interact with intelligence is limited. Often the intelligence is trapped on the screen, and if you use hardware like Plaud, you need to wait for recording to transfer to the phone, upload to the cloud, and get intelligence after processing,” Mo told TechCrunch. “That’s why we are building Ambi to use AI anytime and anywhere.”

The company's ambitions extend beyond its current apps. An upcoming desktop app will be able to look at the work users do and store important parts in its memory to give more personalized suggestions. Ambi also plans to launch its own hardware device, with a screen, a speaker, a camera and microphones to capture context and display information.

Ambient capture raises familiar privacy questions. Ambi says users can turn off ambient data capture at any time and that the feature is off by default; the startup says it does not store recordings and encrypts data, though it did not specify the encryption. Disclosure is left to the user, which Mo described as an industry-wide problem.

“We have to inform our users that they have to tell others about ambient capture. We, as an industry, haven’t solved this problem [of disclosure],” he said.

Ambi currently 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 to work on speech recognition models.