Startup Ambi Raises $26 Million for an App That Listens to You All Day: If It's Recording Others Too, You'll Have to Tell Them Yourself

Silicon Valley's dogma goes like this: AI helps you as much as it knows about you. And to know everything, it has to listen to, watch and record everything. Startups are building such products without much hesitation, convinced that the market for a personal assistant is big enough to swallow the privacy concerns too.

The latest in line is Ambi, run by former Plaud executive Peter Mo. The company announced it has raised 26 million dollars (around 22 million euros) across several rounds led by Luminous Ventures, the fund that invested in Meituan and Unitree Robotics, and electronics maker Huaqin.

Ambi is releasing apps for iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. They work as a meeting note-taker, but users can leave them listening all day to gather context. The promise is that the agent reacts while the conversation is still happening: making suggestions, pulling relevant information from the calendar, previous meetings, the knowledge base and the internet. "Intelligence is trapped on the screen. If you use a device like Plaud, you wait for the recording to reach your phone, upload to the cloud, and only after processing do you get something. That's why we're building Ambi - so AI can be used always and everywhere," says Mo, who is also co-founder and CEO.

The appetite doesn't stop there. The announced desktop app will watch what you're doing and remember the important parts, and the company is also preparing its own device with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones. Ambi has more than 50 employees in San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and is hiring engineers for speech recognition models.

Privacy is where the story starts to creak. Mo says background listening is off by default and the user can stop it at any moment, that no recordings are stored and that data is encrypted - but he didn't specify what kind of encryption. And for the people around the user, the answer is uncomfortably honest: "We have to inform users that they need to tell others they're recording. We, as an industry, haven't solved this problem. If a user wants to hide the recording, we can't stop them," he says.

In other words, the responsibility is shifted onto whoever is wearing the watch. Some meeting note-takers have already been sued for recording conversations without consent, and Apple's Audio Intelligence feature, which continuously transcribes speech, has also raised privacy questions. Picture a meeting or a coffee where one person at the table is wearing a device that listens, and the others don't know. How many people would actually say out loud, "I'm recording you"?