The fundamental premise behind many AI assistants is straightforward: the more an AI understands about you, the more useful it becomes—offering better help with tasks and smarter recommendations. According to tech companies, achieving this level of personalization requires apps and devices to continuously listen, observe, or record your activities to gather every possible piece of context. While this naturally raises concerns about privacy and data security, startups are pressing forward regardless, convinced that the demand for personalized assistance is large enough to outweigh these issues.

Peter Mo, formerly an executive at Plaud, is developing Ambi—an app designed to deliver real-time intelligence and insights by constantly listening to its users. On Monday, the company announced it has secured $26 million through multiple funding rounds. The investment was led by Luminous Ventures, which has previously backed companies such as Meituan and Unitree Robotics, along with Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) Huaqin. Ambi is simultaneously launching applications for iPhones, Macs, and Apple Watch.

These apps function similarly to meeting note-takers, but with a key difference: users can opt to keep them listening throughout the day to capture ongoing context. While existing meeting note-taking companies focus on automating post-call tasks—using summaries, action items, and various software connectors—Ambi aims to push further by having its agent begin working during the meeting itself. The company promises that its AI agent can proactively offer suggestions or surface relevant knowledge in real time, drawing from your calendar, meetings, knowledge base, and web data. Additionally, users can initiate a task on one device and pick it up 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."

The company has broader ambitions to capture even more information. Its forthcoming desktop app will be capable of observing users' work and storing key details in its memory to provide more tailored suggestions—similar to what apps like Littlebird or Minimi already offer. The startup also intends to release its own hardware device, equipped with a screen, speaker, camera, and microphones to capture context and display information.

**Privacy considerations**

Ambi's launch arrives amid heightened scrutiny of AI devices that lack sufficient indicators to signal they are recording people nearby. It remains unclear whether Ambi's apps or its upcoming device will provide adequate warnings to third parties that their conversations are being captured if the user doesn't disclose their use of the technology. Some meeting note-takers have faced lawsuits for recording conversations and data without consent. Moreover, Apple's recent Voice Intelligence feature, which continuously transcribes speech, has sparked privacy concerns.

Mo stated that users can disable ambient data capture on Ambi's apps and devices at any time, and the feature is turned off by default. The startup claims it doesn't retain any user recordings and encrypts the data, though it didn't specify the encryption method used. Despite these safeguards, the responsibility for disclosing ambient capture still falls on users. Mo described this as an industry-wide challenge.

"We have to inform our users that they have to tell others about ambient capture. We, as an industry, haven't solved this problem [of disclosure]. We have tried to put the information about disclosure in every place possible, but if users try to hide the capture, we can't just solve the problem," he said.

Ambi currently employs over 50 staff members across offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. The company is actively hiring for its go-to-market team and AI engineers specializing in speech recognition models.