Meta has acquired AI voice startup WaveForms for an undisclosed sum, according to a report by The Information. This marks the company’s latest move to strengthen its new AI unit, Superintelligence Labs, and its second major AI audio acquisition in the past month following the purchase of PlayAI.
WaveForms, founded just eight months ago, raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz in a funding round that valued the company at $160 million pre-money, as per PitchBook data. Two of the startup’s co-founders—former Meta and OpenAI researcher Alexis Conneau and former Google advertising strategist Coralie Lemaitre—have reportedly joined Meta. Conneau previously co-created GPT4-o Advanced Voice Mode neural networks during his time at OpenAI.
TechCrunch has reached out to WaveForms to confirm whether its third co-founder and chief technologist, Kartikay Khandelwal, will also join Meta, as well as the status of the deal for the company’s approximately 14 other employees, based on LinkedIn data.
WaveForms appears to have taken down its website, but its LinkedIn page outlines its mission as solving the “Speech Turing Test,” which evaluates whether a listener can differentiate between human and AI-generated speech. The startup was also developing “Emotional General Intelligence,” a technology focused on understanding and managing individual self-awareness.