The purchase price was not disclosed. This is Meta’s second major acquisition recently aimed at strengthening its AI division, Superintelligence Labs. A month ago, Meta also acquired another AI voice startup, PlayAI.
WaveForms was founded about eight months ago. The company raised $40 million from the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, valuing it at around $160 million.
One of the startup’s co-founders, Alexis Conneau, previously worked at both Meta and OpenAI. At OpenAI, he contributed to the development of the GPT-4o voice technology. The other co-founder, Coralie Lemaitre, was an advertising expert at Google. Both co-founders are now working at Meta.
It is not yet clear whether other employees of WaveForms will join Meta as part of the deal.
WaveForms’ official website is currently down. However, their LinkedIn page states that their main goal was working on the “Speech Turing Test,” which aims to distinguish between human and AI-generated speech. The company was also developing a project called “Emotional General Intelligence,” focused on understanding and managing human emotions.
This acquisition is part of Meta’s strategy to strengthen its position in the AI and voice technology fields.
