companies

Plaud Inc.

San Francisco hardware company behind Plaud Note and NotePin, AI voice recorders that turn meetings and conversations into transcripts and summaries.

Plaud was founded in 2021 by CEO Nathan Xu, building compact recording hardware meant to pair with GPT-based transcription and summarization rather than compete with a phone's built-in voice memo app. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with additional teams in Shenzhen, Singapore, Tokyo and Seattle. Its first product, Plaud Note, is a credit-card-sized recorder that clips to the back of a phone and can capture in-person conversations as well as phone calls; the follow-up NotePin is a smaller wearable clip built to be worn through the day rather than pulled out for meetings. Both sync recordings to a companion app that runs transcription and templated summaries on top of large language models, including OpenAI's. Plaud has scaled quickly for an AI hardware company: it has said it shipped over two million devices and passed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue by mid-2026, largely funded by that revenue rather than large venture rounds, before taking in outside investment tied to a valuation reported near $2 billion.

Founded

2021

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

hardware