Former Plaud Executive Raises $26 Million for AI App That Listens in the Background

Ambi Releases Apps for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch That Enable Capturing Images of Surroundings

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One of the main promises of AI is that the more information it has about a person, the better it can help them with tasks and make appropriate suggestions, which if you believe tech companies, requires apps and devices to always be listening, watching or recording user activity and gathering all possible context.

Obviously, there are privacy and data security concerns with anything that collects your data on an ongoing basis. But startups build such apps without a hitch anyway, arming themselves with the belief that the personal assistance market is big enough to swallow such concerns.

Peter Moe, ex-Plud CEO, is building Ambi to do something similar. The app aims to provide real-time information and insights to people by constantly listening to them.

The company said on Monday that it has raised $26 million in multiple funding rounds led by Luminous Ventures, which has backed companies such as Meituan and Unitree Robotics and Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) Huaqin.

Ambi also publishes apps for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. These apps act like meeting note takers, but users can choose to listen to them so they can capture text throughout the day.

Meeting note taking companies have worked to automate the tasks that follow a single call, based on the summaries and action items they collect during the conversation, using a number of connectors to software systems. Ambi wants to take this a step further by starting his agent work during the session.

The company's promise is that its AI agent can proactively suggest or provide relevant knowledge to you while you're 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 device.

Co-founder and CEO Moonch said: "The way we interact with intelligence is limited. Intelligence is often trapped on the screen and if you use hardware like Plaud, you have to wait for the recording to be transferred to the phone, uploaded to the cloud and post-processed. That's why we're building Ambi to use AI anytime, anywhere."

The company is ambitious to acquire more information. Its upcoming desktop app will be able to look at what users are doing and store important parts in its memory to make more personalized suggestions. Apps like Littlebird or Minimi already do something similar.

The startup is also planning to launch its own hardware device that will have a screen, speaker, camera and microphone to record text and display information.

Ambi's launch comes amid growing concerns about AI devices not having enough markers to pick up data from people around the user. It is unclear whether Ambi apps or future devices will have sufficient indicators to warn third parties of recording their conversations if the user does not disclose their use of Ambi technology.

Some meeting note takers have even been sued because their technology recorded people's conversations and data without their consent. Additionally, the recent release of Apple's Voice Intelligence feature, which continuously transcribes speech, has raised privacy concerns.

Users can turn off ambient data recording in Ambi apps and devices at any time, Mo said, and the feature is off by default. The startup said it does not store any recordings of users and encrypts data, but did not specify what kind of encryption it uses. Despite these measures, the responsibility of announcing the recording of the environment is still on the users. He classified this as an industry-wide problem.

"We need to let our users know that they need to tell others about ambient recording. We haven't solved this [disclosure] problem as an industry. We've tried to put disclosure information everywhere we can, but if users try to hide the recording, we can't just solve the problem," he said.

Ambi currently has more than 50 employees in its offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. The company is hiring AI engineers to work on speech recognition models for its market performance.

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Evan covers global developments in consumer technology at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked for publications including The Huffington Post and The Next Web.

You can contact or confirm Ivan by sending an email to [email protected] or by sending an encrypted message to ivan.42 on Signal.

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