{"id":55260,"date":"2025-08-08T19:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T19:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/55260\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T19:55:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T19:55:08","slug":"meta-acquires-ai-audio-startup-waveforms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/55260\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta acquires AI audio startup WaveForms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Meta has acquired AI voice startup WaveForms for an undisclosed sum, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theinformation.com\/articles\/meta-acquires-ai-audio-startup-waveforms\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">The Information reports<\/a>. It\u2019s the company\u2019s latest buy to strengthen its new AI unit, Superintelligence Labs, and Meta\u2019s second major AI audio acquisition in the last month after it <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/07\/13\/meta-acquires-voice-startup-play-ai\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">bought PlayAI<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">WaveForms, founded just eight months ago, raised $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz in a round that valued the company at $160 million pre-money, per PitchBook data.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Two of the startup\u2019s co-founders \u2014 former Meta and OpenAI researcher Alexis Conneau, and former Google advertising strategist Coralie Lemaitre \u2014 have reportedly joined Meta. While at OpenAI, Conneau co-created GPT4-o Advanced Voice Mode neural networks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">TechCrunch has reached out to WaveForms to find out if its third co-founder and chief technologist, Kartikay Khandelwal, will also join Meta, as well as the outcome of the deal for the roughly 14 other staffers (per LinkedIn) at the company.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">WaveForms appears to have taken down its own <a href=\"http:\/\/www.waveforms.ai\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">website<\/a>, but the company\u2019s LinkedIn page describes its mission as solving the \u201cSpeech Turing Test,\u201d which tries to measure if a listener can distinguish between human and AI-generated speech. WaveForms was also developing \u201cEmotional General Intelligence,\u201d which focuses on understanding individual self-awareness and management.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Meta has acquired AI voice startup WaveForms for an undisclosed sum, The Information reports. It\u2019s the company\u2019s latest&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,36888,276,277,49,48,20132,2746,13909,281,61,36889],"class_list":["post-55260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-voice","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-in-brief","tag-mark-zuckerberg","tag-mergers-and-acquisitions","tag-meta","tag-technology","tag-waveforms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}