Ambi Raises $26 Million to Build an AI That Listens to Your Meetings Before You Ask

Mistlabs has officially launched Ambi AI, an ambient intelligence app that listens continuously in the background and offers real-time suggestions, along with $26 million in combined funding. The round was led by Luminous Ventures, an investor previously behind Meituan and Unitree, with participation from Huaqin, the original design manufacturer that builds hardware for many global phone brands.

The company was founded by Peter Mo, a former executive at AI recorder maker Plaud, and its premise is that meeting assistants should not wait until a call ends to be useful. Mo told TechCrunch that most AI platforms wait for the user to prompt them, and that hardware recorders still require uploading a recording and waiting for cloud processing before any intelligence arrives. Ambi is designed to act before the user even thinks to ask.

The app is available on iPhone, Mac and Apple Watch. It draws on the user's calendar, knowledge bases and web data to surface relevant information while a conversation is happening, and tasks can start on one device and continue on another. In a competitor discussion, for example, agents can fact-check claims in real time, compare rival products and draft a proposal on a MacBook before participants leave the room.

A feature called Routines lets users assign recurring jobs to multiple agents at once, and the agents keep working after meetings end, flagging missing information or new developments as projects move. Mistlabs says agent-to-agent negotiation is coming in the next few months, allowing the assistants of two users to identify overlapping priorities and bargain toward a mutually acceptable outcome during live conversations.

The roadmap extends beyond software. The company plans a standalone wearable later this year equipped with a screen, speaker, camera and microphones, plus a desktop app that observes user workflows and stores important details in memory for more personalized help. Mistlabs employs more than fifty people across San Francisco, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

All of this raises obvious privacy questions. The launch lands amid growing concern about AI devices that capture conversations without any visible indicator to the people around the user, and several meeting note-taking products have faced lawsuits over recording without consent. Ambi ships with ambient data capture switched off by default, and Mistlabs says it does not store recordings and encrypts data, though it has not specified the encryption type. Mo acknowledged that disclosure responsibility ultimately falls on users and called third-party notification an industry-wide problem that has not been solved.

That admission is the honest part of the pitch. Always-listening assistants are technically feasible and increasingly well funded; whether they become mainstream will depend less on model quality than on whether anyone solves the consent problem that everyone in the industry currently describes as unsolved.