WaveForms, founded by former OpenAI speech R&D director, receives $40 million in seed funding from a16z

On December 9th, according to Fortune, Alexis Conneau, former head of speech research at OpenAI and ChatGPT speech function responsible person, announced the establishment of WaveForms, which received $40 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The company was co-founded with business strategy expert Coralie Lamaitre and focuses on the research and development of Emotionally General Intelligence (EGI), aiming to develop audio LLM that can understand subtle differences in tone, intonation, and accent.