WaveForms AI is an audio LLM research and product company founded in 2024 by former OpenAI voice research lead Alexis Conneau and Coralie Lemaitre. The company set out to solve what it called the 'Speech Turing Test' and pursue 'Emotional General Intelligence' (EGI) by building speech foundation models that capture and convey tone, inflection, accent, and emotion in real-time conversation. WaveForms emerged from stealth in December 2024 with $40M in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz at a $200M post-money valuation. In August 2025, the company was acquired by Meta and the founders joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs to advance the company's voice AI capabilities.
WaveForms AI has been acquired
This company is no longer available on our private secondary market.
Company data and valuation marks are estimates and may be incomplete, stale, erroneous, or revised.
Founded
2024
Employees
11–50
Total Funding
$40M
1 rounds
Latest Valuation
$0.2B
December 9, 2024
Total raised $40M across 1 rounds
Funding data and valuation marks are estimates and may be incomplete, stale, erroneous, or revised.
Last updated 06-25-2026
Latest Round
Type
Seed
Date
December 9, 2024
Amount
$40M
Valuation
$0.2B
Lead Investors
Alexis Conneau
Co-Founder & CEO
Coralie Lemaitre
Co-Founder & COO
Competitor list is illustrative and may be incomplete, stale, or erroneous.
ElevenLabs
Voice AI platform offering text-to-speech, voice cloning, and conversational voice agents; widely seen as the leading independent voice AI foundation model company.
Sesame AI
Voice AI startup building conversational speech models with emphasis on natural, emotional voice presence; led by ex-Oculus founder Brendan Iribe.
Hume AI
Empathic voice interface and emotion-AI startup building speech LLMs that detect and respond to emotional cues.
Cartesia
Real-time generative voice and audio model startup founded by ex-Stanford state-space-model researchers.
OpenAI
Maker of ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, an audio-native LLM offering competing emotionally expressive voice capabilities.
PlayAI
Voice AI agent and TTS platform acquired by Meta in mid-2025, a direct adjacent competitor in conversational voice AI.
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