Former Plaud exec’s Ambi raises $26M for ambient AI note-taking

Former Plaud executive Peter Mo is launching Ambi, an AI productivity app designed to listen in the background and surface useful context while people work. According to TechCrunch, the company has raised $26 million across multiple rounds and is releasing apps for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch.

The pitch is bigger than meeting transcription. Ambi wants to move AI note-taking from after-the-call summaries toward real-time help during meetings, which could appeal to founders, freelancers and small teams that spend much of their day switching between calls, calendars and follow-up tasks.

Ambi’s bet: notes are not enough

Ambi’s apps work like meeting note-takers, according to TechCrunch, but users can also choose to keep them listening through the day so the software can capture more context. The company says its agent can use a person’s calendar, meetings, knowledge base and web data to suggest information while a meeting is still happening.

That is the main difference Ambi is trying to establish against conventional AI note-taking workflows. Many meeting tools capture a call, produce a summary and extract action items after the discussion ends. Ambi is aiming to begin that assistance earlier, while the conversation is in progress.

The company also says users can start a task on one device and continue it on another. That cross-device angle matters for Apple-heavy professionals who move between a phone, laptop and watch during the workday.

Mo told TechCrunch that screen-bound AI and hardware recorders can slow the path from recording to insight, because recordings often need to move between devices and cloud processing before users get results. Ambi is being positioned as a more continuous layer of assistance rather than a single-purpose recorder.

How it stacks up against Otter and Fireflies

For everyday note-taking, Ambi will inevitably be compared with meeting assistants such as Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai. Based on the information available, however, it is too early to say Ambi is better. TechCrunch did not report benchmarks, pricing, accuracy tests, integrations or hands-on comparisons.

What Ambi does appear to emphasize is ambient capture and in-meeting assistance. That could be useful if your main pain is not just remembering what was said, but finding the right document, context or next step while the discussion is still happening.

For many freelancers and small businesses, the more practical question is whether that extra context is worth the privacy trade-off. A standard meeting note-taker is already sensitive because it records conversations. A tool that can listen throughout the day raises a different level of concern, especially when other people are nearby.

Ambi also lands in a broader race to make AI meeting tools more proactive. Emonarc recently covered Google’s local-first approach to offline meeting notes in AI Edge Foresight, another sign that meeting capture is moving beyond simple transcripts.

Privacy and disclosure are the hard part

The most important unanswered questions are about consent and visibility. TechCrunch notes that it is not clear whether Ambi’s apps or planned hardware will include enough indicators to alert people around the user that they are being recorded, if the user does not disclose it.

Mo said Ambi users can switch off ambient capture on the company’s apps and devices at any time, and that the feature is off by default. The startup also told TechCrunch it does not store user recordings and encrypts data, though it did not specify the type of encryption.

Even with those safeguards, the company appears to place disclosure responsibility largely on the user. Mo described this as an industry-wide problem and said Ambi tries to inform users that they need to tell others about ambient capture.

That matters for creators, consultants, sales teams and agencies. If you plan to use any always-listening assistant in client calls, team meetings or public spaces, you will need a clear consent habit and should check the rules that apply where you work. The source article also notes that some meeting note-taking companies have faced lawsuits over recording conversations and data without consent.

What comes next for Ambi

Ambi is not stopping at phone, desktop and watch apps. According to TechCrunch, the company’s upcoming desktop app will be able to observe a user’s work and store important parts in memory to provide more personalized suggestions. The article also says Ambi plans to launch its own hardware device with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones.

The company currently has more than 50 staff across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. It is hiring for go-to-market roles and AI engineers focused on speech recognition models, according to TechCrunch.

For now, Ambi is a product to watch rather than a clear replacement for established meeting assistants. Its most interesting promise is real-time, context-aware help across Apple devices. Its biggest challenge is convincing users, coworkers and clients that ambient AI can be useful without becoming intrusive.