Meta Platforms Inc. has reportedly acquired WaveForms AI Inc., a developer of artificial intelligence models optimized to understand speech.
The Information broke the news on Thursday.
It’s unclear how much Meta is paying for WaveForms. Last December, the startup raised $40 million at a $200 million valuation, which suggests the sale price was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In recent months, Meta and other tech giants have paid significant premiums to recruit the staff of venture-backed AI startups.
WaveForms was founded in 2024 by Alexis Conneau and Coralie Lemaitre. Conneau is a former OpenAI researcher who worked on GPT-4’s Voice Mode feature, which allows users to interact with the model using their voice. Lemaitre is a former Google LLC ad strategist.
When WaveForms announced its $40 million funding round last year, Bloomberg reported that the company didn’t yet have a product. A blog post from investor Andreessen Horowitz, which led the round, stated that WaveForms was in the process of training an “end-to-end audio language model.”
Processing speech historically required three different AI models. One transcribes the user’s speech into a text prompt, another generates a text-based response to the prompt and a third turns the response into speech. The Andreessen Horowitz blog post indicated that WaveForms’ technology allows one model to perform all three tasks, a potentially more efficient approach.
The company also planned to equip its model with the ability to detect emotional cues in speech. The goal was to have the model adapt its output based on those cues.
According to The Information, Conneau and Lemaitre have joined Meta as part of the acquisition. It’s unclear whether they will work at TBD Labs, the business unit that is leading the Facebook parent’s AI research efforts. The Wall Street Journal reported today that the unit is staffed by many of the researchers Meta has poached from OpenAI and Google in recent weeks.
WaveForms is the second voice AI startup that Meta has acquired in the past month. It previously bought Play AI Inc., which developed a platform that can create voice AI agents for tasks such as processing customer support requests. The company raised $21 million prior to its sale.
Meta reportedly told staffers in a memo that Play AI will help enhance its Meta AI chatbot’s voice features. Like ChatGPT, the chatbot provides support for voice commands. Additionally, Meta is developing a feature that allows Meta AI to translate speech in Instagram Reels videos.
The WaveForms acquisition may also be part of the effort to improve the chatbot. Additionally, the technology and know-how that Meta is gaining through the deal may help enhance its Llama large language model series. Many of the algorithms in the lineup can process voice input.
According to today’s Journal report, TBD Labs is working on a new Llama model known as Llama 4.5 and Llama 4.X internally. The research group is said to be focused on making Meta’s LLMs better at reasoning tasks. It’s unclear when the upcoming Llama model might launch or if it will be available under an open-source license like its predecessors.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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