Ambi secures $26M to build a context-aware AI assistant

Ambi launches with $26 million in backing

Ambi, a startup co-founded by former Plaud executive Peter Mo, has raised $26 million across multiple funding rounds led by Luminous Ventures and original design manufacturer Huaqin. The company is releasing applications for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch that combine meeting-note functions with an optional capability to listen for context throughout the day.

Luminous Ventures has backed companies including Meituan and Unitree Robotics. Ambi has more than 50 employees working across San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, and is hiring for go-to-market roles and AI engineers focused on speech-recognition models.

From meeting summaries to in-meeting assistance

Meeting note-taking products commonly produce summaries and action items after a call, then use connectors to trigger work in other software systems. Ambi is positioning its product a step further: its AI agent is intended to provide suggestions or retrieve relevant knowledge while a meeting is under way.

The company says those suggestions can draw on a user’s calendar, meetings, knowledge base and web data. Users can also begin a task on one device and continue it on another. Mo said the aim is to make AI available across contexts rather than requiring users to wait for a recording to move to a phone, upload to the cloud and be processed.

Ambi also plans a desktop application that can examine users’ work and retain important elements in memory for more personalised suggestions. Its product roadmap includes a hardware device with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones intended to capture context and display information.

Disclosure remains the unresolved issue

The launch arrives as concerns grow over AI tools that may capture information from people near the user without clear indicators. It remains unclear whether Ambi’s applications or planned device will provide sufficient signals to third parties that a conversation is being recorded when the user does not disclose it.

Mo said ambient capture can be switched off at any time and is disabled by default. Ambi says it does not store users’ recordings and encrypts the data, although it has not specified the type of encryption used. Mo described disclosure as an industry-wide problem and said users must tell others when ambient capture is active.

For businesses, the practical implication is to establish consent, notification and data-governance rules before deploying tools that continuously collect workplace context, particularly in meetings involving employees, customers or partners.