Former Plaud executive Peter Mo has raised $26 million for Ambi, an AI app that listens throughout the day and offers real-time help while conversations are still happening.
The funding, spread across multiple rounds, was led by Luminous Ventures and original design manufacturer Huaqin, and was first reported by TechCrunch on Monday.
Ambi is built by Mistlabs, a San Francisco startup, and launches alongside new apps for the iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch.
The apps work like meeting note-takers, but users can also leave them listening in the background so the software keeps gathering context across the whole day.
From note-taker to live helper
Meeting note-taking tools have spent the last two years racing to automate what happens after a call ends: transcripts, summaries, action items and follow-up tasks.
Ambi wants to move that work forward into the meeting itself.
The company's AI agent is designed to surface suggestions and relevant information while a discussion is still in progress, drawing on a user's calendar, previous meetings, knowledge base and web data.
Users can also start a task on one device and pick it up on another without restarting the conversation.
Mo, Ambi's co-founder and CEO, argues that today's AI tools are still too slow and fragmented.
With hardware like the Plaud recorder, he says, users must wait for a recording to transfer to a phone and upload to the cloud before getting any insight.
Ambi is built to make assistance available as conversations unfold, not minutes after they end.
Hardware plans and a growing team
The startup's ambitions go beyond phone and watch apps.
An upcoming desktop app will observe the work users do and store important elements in memory to make more personalized recommendations, in the same vein as apps like Littlebird and Minimi.
Ambi is also planning its own hardware device with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones, designed to gather context and display information.
To build it, the company has grown to a 50-person team spread across San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
The privacy question
An app that listens all day raises obvious questions about consent and data security.
Ambi says ambient capture is switched off by default and that captured data is encrypted, framing continuous listening as an opt-in feature rather than the norm.
How users and the people around them respond to always-on microphones will be the real test of the product.
Whether Ambi's bet pays off or not, its raise signals where the meeting-assistant market is heading: away from passive summaries and toward AI that works while you talk.
By Hamza Faisal
