PLAUD.AI Acquires YC-Backed StarJar to Power Its New Enterprise Solution, PLAUD for Business

SAN FRANCISCO, April 15, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- PLAUD.AI's brand owner PLAUD Inc., a Delaware-incorporated, San Francisco-based industry leader in AI-native hardware and software solutions for AI note-taking, today announced its acquisition of StarJar, a Y Combinator-backed medical AI provider. The acquisition will accelerate the launch of PLAUD for Business, a unified platform where teams capture, organize, and leverage collective intelligence.

Founded in December 2021 and entirely bootstrapped, PLAUD.AI has built a global presence with teams in San Francisco, Seattle, Tokyo, and Shenzhen, each focused on different core functions. In just over two years, the company has scaled to an impressive $180 million annual revenue run rate, achieving 10x annual growth for two consecutive years.

PLAUD.AI: From Consumer Success to Enterprise Transformation
Since its market entry, PLAUD.AI has experienced explosive growth with its two flagship consumer products, the PLAUD NOTE and PLAUD NotePin, reaching over 700,000 users globally, making it the second-largest AI hardware product by volume globally, just behind Meta Ray-Ban. With a solid professional user base now in place, PLAUD.AI is expanding into the enterprise space with solutions that drive greater efficiency and productivity for businesses.

The intelligence platform enables teams to:

• Transform note-taking and documentation processes through advanced AI automation
• Create an efficient workflow and collaborative workspace for team productivity
• Extract actionable intelligence from meetings and conversations

These power solutions serve professionals across diverse sectors, including field sales, healthcare professionals, legal practitioners, headhunters, technicians, and beyond.

PLAUD for Business meets the highest enterprise security and data privacy standards, including HIPAA and SOC 2, among other security frameworks. The data protection commitment makes PLAUD.AI a trusted partner for individual and enterprise users.

"We've been listening carefully to our users, and there's been an overwhelming demand for enterprise-level solutions that allow teams to collaborate through a unified intelligence platform and tailor-made capabilities," said Nathan Hsu, Co-Founder and CEO of PLAUD.AI. "Professionals aren't just looking to enhance their individual productivity—they want tools that can capture collective intelligence and transform how entire organizations work together. That's exactly what drove this acquisition and the creation of PLAUD for Business."

StarJar Founders Joining PLAUD.AI
Following the acquisition, StarJar's two co-founders, Ruming Zhen and Qi Zhang, will join PLAUD.AI to lead the development of PLAUD for Business, slated for official launch in the summer of 2025.

Ruming Zhen is an accomplished AI and software professional with an impressive background. A Stanford graduate, he previously held product leadership roles at Tesla and Intuit. Qi Zhang brings deep expertise in software engineering and AI development, having spent nearly a decade at Amazon, where he contributed to several of the company's most innovative initiatives.

The duo began their entrepreneurial journey in medical AI in 2023. Invited by PLAUD, they are now joining forces to build the next-generation enterprise AI note-taking solution. Unlike other software-only AI note-taking tools on the market, PLAUD's solution leverages dedicated sensors to capture conversations in multiple scenarios, unlocking previously untapped real-life data and creating tremendous incremental value.

Expands Vision with Strategic Developer Platform Investment
PLAUD.AI has also begun significant engineering investments to build a comprehensive developer platform with APIs and SDKs. This platform will enable AI companies and clients to build solutions on top of PLAUD's intelligence infrastructure, which encompasses hardware, software, cloud services, and AI capabilities. Yijia Zhang, former founder and CEO of Lingxin Intelligent and an early member of Google's Assistant and Android Auto team, has recently joined PLAUD.AI to lead these engineering efforts.

About PLAUD.AI
PLAUD.AI is building the next generation of intelligence infrastructure and interface from what you hear, say, and see. Its unified infrastructure seamlessly integrates hardware, software, cloud services, and AI capabilities. Through three distinct interfaces—prosumer products, enterprise solutions, and an OS-level developer platform—PLAUD.AI is transforming how the world captures, extracts, and utilizes intelligence from both digital and real-life interactions.

For more information, visit the PLAUD.AI website, or follow PLAUD.AI on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube.

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SOURCE PLAUD.AI