Former Plaud exec raises $26M for AI app that listens to you in the background

One of the core promises of AI is that the more it knows about a person, the better it will be able to assist them with tasks and make appropriate suggestions, which, if you’ll believe the tech companies, requires apps and devices to listen, watch, or record users’ activity all the time and gather all possible context.

There’s obviously privacy and data security concerns with anything that’s collecting data about you continuously. But startups are building such apps undeterred anyway, arming themselves with the belief that the market for personalized assistance is big enough to swallow such concerns.

Former Plaud exec Peter Mo is building Ambi to do something similar. The app aims to provide real-time intelligence and insights to people by listening to them all the time.

The company said on Monday that it has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds led by Luminous Ventures, which has backed companies like Meituan and Unitree Robotics, and original design manufacturer (ODM) Huaqin.

Ambi is also releasing apps for iPhones, Macs, and Apple Watch. These apps act like meeting notetakers, but users can choose to have them listening so they can capture context all day.

Meeting notetaking companies have been working to automate tasks that follow once calls are done, based on the summaries and action items they gather during the conversation, and using multitudes of connectors to software systems. Ambi wants to take this a step further by having its agent start the work during the meeting itself.

The company’s promise is that its AI agent can proactively give you suggestions or surface relevant knowledge while you are in a meeting, based on your calendar, meetings, knowledge base, and web data. Users can also start 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. That’s why we are building Ambi to use AI anytime and anywhere,” Mo, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.