Former Plaud executive raises $26M for ambient AI app

Ambi, a startup founded by former Plaud executive Peter Mo, has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds. Luminous Ventures and Huaqin led the rounds, the company said Monday. Luminous Ventures has backed companies including Meituan and Unitree Robotics.

Ambi is releasing apps for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch that can listen throughout the day to capture context. The company says its AI agent can use calendar entries, meetings, a knowledge base and web data to offer suggestions or surface relevant information during a meeting. Users can start a task on one device and continue it on another.

Ambi plans a desktop app that can observe users’ work and store selected information in its memory. It also plans a hardware device with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones. The company says ambient capture is off by default, can be turned off at any time, and that it does not store recordings and encrypts data. It did not specify the encryption method.

Mo told TechCrunch that users are responsible for telling others when ambient capture is active, describing disclosure as an industry-wide problem. The source does not establish whether Ambi’s apps or planned device have indicators that alert nearby people to recording. Ambi has over 50 staff across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and is hiring for go-to-market roles and AI engineering work on speech recognition models.