WaveForms AI, a startup focused on developing emotionally intelligent audio AI, has raised $40 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The company, founded by former OpenAI researcher Alexis Conneau and Coralie Lamaitre, aims to create AI that can understand and replicate human emotions through voice interactions, potentially passing the Speech Turing Test. This investment values WaveForms at $200 million. Conneau, previously involved in creating ChatGPT's voice at OpenAI, now leads WaveForms to unlock AI's emotional intelligence, which could revolutionize how we interact with technology by interpreting tone and hesitation for more natural conversations. The startup's AI assistants aim to pick up on emotional cues from verbal interactions, and its founders are veterans from OpenAI and Google.