Peter Mo, a former executive at the recorder company Plaud, has founded a startup called Ambi that is building an AI app designed to listen to users continuously in the background. The company said Monday it has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds. The round was led by Luminous Ventures, which has backed Meituan and Unitree Robotics, along with the original design manufacturer Huaqin.
Ambi is releasing apps for iPhones, Macs and the Apple Watch that function like meeting note-takers, but with an option for users to leave them listening so they can capture context throughout the day. The company says its AI agent can offer suggestions or surface relevant knowledge during a meeting, drawing on a user's calendar, meetings, knowledge base and web data. Users can begin a task on one device and pick it up on another.
Mo said the way people interact with intelligence is limited because it is often confined to a screen, and hardware such as Plaud requires a recording to move to a phone and then to the cloud before any intelligence is produced. He said Ambi is meant to make AI usable anytime and anywhere. The startup has further ambitions to collect information: an upcoming desktop app will be able to observe the work users do and retain important parts in its memory to give more personalized suggestions, similar to what apps like Littlebird or Minimi already do. Ambi also plans to launch its own hardware device with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones.
The launch comes as concern grows about AI devices that lack sufficient indicators to show they are capturing data on people near the user. It is not clear whether Ambi's apps or its planned device will include enough signals to alert third parties that their conversations are being recorded when the user does not disclose that Ambi's technology is in use. Some meeting note-takers have been sued over recording people's conversations and data without their consent, and the arrival of Apple's Voice Intelligence feature, which transcribes speech continuously, has raised privacy questions.
Mo said users can switch off ambient data capture in Ambi's apps and devices at any time, and that the feature is off by default. The startup said it does not store recordings of users and encrypts data, though it did not say what kind of encryption it uses. Mo said the responsibility for telling others about ambient capture still falls on users, and he described disclosure as a problem the industry as a whole has not solved.
Ambi currently has more than 50 staff members across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and is hiring for its go-to-market team and for AI engineers to work on speech recognition models. The privacy questions surrounding always-on assistants carry particular weight in the US, where consent laws vary by state and litigation against note-taking tools has already begun.
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