- Plaud is targeting a US IPO in 2028, once its annual revenue clears $1 billion.
- The AI notetaker hit $100M in ARR and turned profitable at a $1B+ valuation.
- It joins Pocket, Sandbar and Granola in a fast-consolidating AI memory market.
PLAUD, the startup behind a line of AI-powered note-taking devices, is targeting a US initial public offering in 2028, once its annual revenue clears $1 billion, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Co-founder and chief executive Nathan Xu told the paper the company was valued at more than $1 billion in 2025 and is currently profitable.
Founded in 2022, Plaud makes hardware, most notably the Plaud Note, a card-sized device that clips to a smartphone, paired with software that transcribes and condenses conversations.
It has reached $100 million in annualised recurring revenue with more than 2.5 million users across over 170 countries, and it’s aiming for $500 million in global sales in 2026. The US and Europe together account for roughly two-thirds of that revenue.
Talent over turf
The company’s largest investor is Vertex Holdings, a Singaporean venture firm wholly owned by Temasek that runs an international network of funds under the Vertex Ventures banner.
Plaud sources its chips from third-party suppliers, including Taiwanese chipmaker Realtek, and manufactures its hardware in Shenzhen, while keeping design and engineering work in-house. Around 300 of its staff are based in China, nearly 100 in San Francisco, and it also has teams across Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia. Its Singapore hub, opened as an Asia-Pacific base, has grown from ten people to a hundred in nine months.
Xu said the company has explored acquisitions, though none have closed yet. The logic isn’t the usual one: it’s about hiring engineering capacity Plaud can’t build fast enough on its own.
That’s a narrower vision than most hardware startups make at this stage, and it says something about how fast Xu thinks the underlying technology is moving.
A crowded conversation market
Plaud isn’t alone in trying to turn spoken conversation into structured data.
Tech Fundign News has covered Pocket, which raised $11 million from Accel and Y Combinator after shipping 35,000 devices and reaching $27 million in annualised revenue, and Sandbar, the ex-Meta-founded startup that raised $23 million for its Stream ring.
On the software side, London’s Granola raised a $43 million Series B before jumping to a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, a sixfold markup in under a year.
That range of formats suggests investors aren’t betting on one shape winning so much as on the idea that conversation itself is the next data layer worth owning. Plaud’s edge, for now, is that it’s already profitable and already turning a hardware business into a subscription one, which is more than most of the category can say.
Whether that holds once Granola-style software players start encroaching on hardware’s territory, or vice versa, is the more interesting question than the IPO date itself.
