Meta has bought WaveForms, a newly established cutting-edge AI voice start-up, as reported by The Information, for an undisclosed sum. This is the second major audio acquisition pertaining to AI in a period of just a month under Meta after acquiring PlayAI. The move is in accordance with the new Meta technology division, Superintelligence Labs.
Founded just eight months ago, WaveForms quickly gained traction, securing $40 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz at a $160 million pre-money valuation, per PitchBook data.
Co-founders of the company—Alexis Conneau, until recently with Meta and OpenAI, and Coralie Lemaitre, who has been associated with Google advertising strategy- have apparently joined Meta. Notably, Conneau co-developed the GPT-4o's Advanced Voice Mode neural networks during his time in OpenAI.
Confirmation is being sought by TechCrunch on whether Kartikay Khandelwal, WaveForms' third co-founder and chief technologist, will join Meta, and indeed what the future holds for the startup's 14-member team, as listed on LinkedIn.
WaveForms has yanked its website, but its LinkedIn page describes its mission as solving the "Speech Turing Test"-the litmus test whereby artificial speech is understood to be indistinguishable from human speech. The company was also working on "Emotional General Intelligence," aiming to understand and model individual emotional self-awareness and regulation.