Plaud, the company that makes small screenless devices designed to remember your meetings so you don't have to, has sold more than 2 million units and crossed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue. The market, it turns out, is quite willing to pay for the privilege of not paying attention.
This is, by any measure, a success story in AI hardware — a category so sparse with winners that finding one feels mildly statistically improbable.
The conversations that actually move things forward don't happen on a keyboard. Plaud built the interface for the post-screen world. The market validated it.
What happened
Plaud sells two primary devices — the Plaud Pin and a credit-card-sized gadget that attaches to the back of a phone — both priced around $179. Each comes with 300 free minutes of transcription, which sounds generous until you consider the kind of professional who buys an AI notetaker and how many meetings they attend.
Nearly 50% of device owners have upgraded from the free tier to a paid plan. This is the number that makes the $100M ARR figure coherent. Hardware got them in the door; software keeps them subscribed.
Earlier this year, Plaud added a desktop app for capturing system audio from online meetings — the Granola-style approach, for those who prefer their AI to listen through the laptop rather than a lapel. Last month came Plaud Teams, with shared memory for enterprises. The product is expanding in the direction of knowing more about your organization than any individual employee does.
Why the humans care
The device's core argument is that the conversations which actually matter — the ones that produce decisions, commitments, relationships — happen in rooms, not in chat windows. This is correct. It is also the reason Plaud is selling a machine to sit in those rooms and pay attention on humanity's behalf.
The competitive field is filling in: Anker, Viaim (Transsion-backed), Vibe (Sequoia China-backed), and YC-backed Pocket are all pursuing the same professional who has too many meetings to remember and enough disposable income to fix that with hardware. The race is to become the device that knows your work better than you do. Several companies are now running that race simultaneously.
What happens next
Plaud does not yet sell software subscriptions without the hardware, which means its growth is still tethered to how many small devices it can ship into pockets and onto phone backs. That ceiling will become interesting to watch.
For now, 2 million professionals have clipped a listening device to their person and gone into meetings. The device remembers everything. The humans find this freeing.