Ex-Plaud exec Peter Mo raises $26M for always-listening AI app Ambi

Former Plaud executive Peter Mo has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds for Ambi, an AI app that listens to users all day and pushes real-time intelligence into their meetings. The company announced the raise on Monday.

Luminous Ventures, an investor in Meituan and Unitree Robotics, led the rounds alongside Original Design Manufacturer Huaqin. Ambi is launching apps for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch simultaneously with the announcement.

What does Ambi actually do?

The apps work like meeting note-takers, but users can leave them listening all day to capture context continuously. Where existing note-taking companies automate follow-up tasks after a call ends — using summaries, action items and connectors into other software — Ambi wants its agent to start working during the meeting itself.

The company says its AI agent can proactively surface suggestions and relevant knowledge mid-conversation, drawing on the user's calendar, meetings, knowledge base and web data. Users can also start a task on one device and pick it up on another.

Mo, Ambi's co-founder and CEO, framed the product as an escape from the delays built into hardware-based rivals like Plaud's recorders.

"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."

Ambi has bigger capture ambitions. An upcoming desktop app will watch the work users do and store important parts in its memory to sharpen personalized suggestions — an approach already taken by apps like Littlebird and Minimi. The startup also plans its own hardware device, equipped with a screen, a speaker, a camera and microphones, to capture context and display information.

Can an always-on listener survive the privacy debate?

Ambi's launch lands amid intensifying scrutiny of AI devices that lack clear indicators showing they are recording people around the user. It remains unclear whether Ambi's apps or the planned device will carry enough signals to alert third parties that their conversations are being captured, if the user never discloses that Ambi is running.

The risk is not hypothetical. Some meeting note-taking vendors have been sued because their technology recorded people's conversations and data without consent. Apple's recently released Voice Intelligence feature, which transcribes speech continuously, has drawn similar privacy concerns.

Mo said users can switch off ambient data capture on Ambi's apps and devices at any time, and the feature ships off by default. The company said it stores no recordings of users and encrypts their data, though it did not specify what kind of encryption it uses.

Even with those measures, the burden of declaring ambient capture still falls on the user — something Mo called 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]," Mo said. "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."

Who is building it?

Ambi employs more than 50 staff across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The startup is currently hiring for its go-to-market function and for AI engineers to work on speech recognition models.

With $26 million in the bank, apps already shipping across Apple's ecosystem and a first-party hardware device on the roadmap, Ambi is betting that demand for ambient, personalized assistance will outweigh the disclosure problem its own CEO admits the industry has not solved.