Former Plaud executive Peter Mo raises $26M for continuous ambient listening app

Ambi, Mo's new startup, closed a $26 million raise across several rounds, the company announced Monday. Luminous Ventures led — the firm backed Meituan and Unitree Robotics — with participation from Chinese ODM manufacturer Huaqin. The capital funds iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch apps that transcribe meetings but also run a persistent ambient-listening mode to gather context all day.

Standard transcription tools process audio after the fact. Ambi's agent is designed to work in real time: surfacing relevant knowledge, proposing tasks and completing actions mid-meeting, drawing on your calendar, meeting history, personal knowledge base and the web. You can start a task on one device and pick it up on another. Mo says the idea came from the friction of dedicated hardware like Plaud — record, transfer to phone, upload to cloud, process — which leaves the intelligence "trapped on the screen" and disconnected from the moment it's needed.

Next up: a desktop app that watches you work, commits chunks to memory and uses them for personalized suggestions — territory Littlebird and Minimi already occupy. In parallel, Ambi plans its own hardware device with screen, speaker, camera and microphones to capture context and surface information without a phone.

The launch arrives amid mounting scrutiny of AI wearables that lack clear recording indicators. Ambi says ambient listening is off by default, can be killed instantly, and that the company stores no recordings and encrypts data — though it hasn't specified the encryption. Informing bystanders falls to the user. Mo acknowledges an industry-wide problem no one has solved: the app surfaces disclosure reminders everywhere, but if a user hides the recording, Ambi has no technical lever to stop them. Lawsuits against competitors for non-consensual recording are already piling up, and Apple's new Audio Intelligence transcribes continuously on device. The tension between convenience and privacy is only sharpening.