Coralie Lemaitre is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the artificial intelligence startup WaveForms AI. Along with co-founder Alexis Conneau, she developed the company with the goal of creating emotionally intelligent audio-based AI before it was acquired by Meta Platforms in 2025, she recently joined the Meta Superintelligence team. ^{[1] [2] [4]}

Education

Lemaitre pursued a dual-degree program in France, attending two of the country's prominent engineering schools. From 2009 to 2015, she studied at École Polytechnique, where she earned a Master's degree in Engineering and was recognized for graduating in the top 10% of her class. Concurrently, from 2014 to 2015, she attended Mines Paris - PSL (formerly Mines ParisTech), obtaining a Master's degree in Business and Executive Engineering. ^{[3] [4]}

Career

Lemaitre began her career with a series of diverse roles that provided a foundation in both technical and operational fields. In 2011, she served as an Officer in the French Army. Following this, she worked as an assistant preschool teacher from 2011 to 2012. Her entry into the technology sector included internships at the early-stage startup Cambridge Nanosystems in 2013 and in the research and development department at the chemical company Solvay in 2014.

In 2015, Lemaitre joined Boston Consulting Group (BCG) as a Senior Consultant, a role she held for nearly four years until 2019. She then transitioned into the corporate technology industry, taking on a position in Strategy and Business Acceleration at Cisco from 2019 to 2021. She subsequently moved to ServiceNow, where she worked in Product Strategy from 2021 to 2022. Prior to co-founding her own company, Lemaitre was a business strategy leader at Google, working in Central Strategy and Operations from 2022 to 2024. ^{[3] [1] [4]}

WaveForms AI

In 2024, Lemaitre co-founded WaveForms AI with Alexis Conneau, a prominent researcher in large language models. Lemaitre assumed the role of Chief Operating Officer, responsible for driving the company's product strategy and business operations. The San Francisco-based startup aimed to develop an end-to-end audio language model capable of understanding and replicating human emotional nuances in speech. The stated goal was to create an AI that could pass a "speech Turing test," making interactions with the technology feel indistinguishable from speaking with a person. This approach differed from conventional voice AI systems that typically rely on a multi-step process of speech-to-text transcription, text-based response generation, and text-to-speech synthesis. WaveForms AI's model was designed to process audio natively for more seamless, real-time interactions.

In December 2024, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced it was leading a $40 million funding round for WaveForms AI. The firm cited the strength of the founding team and the company's focus on "emotional general intelligence (EGI)" as key reasons for the investment.

On August 8, 2025, it was reported that Meta Platforms, Inc. had acquired WaveForms AI. The acquisition was part of Meta's broader strategy to enhance its capabilities in AI-powered audio and generative AI. As part of the acquisition, Lemaitre and her co-founder, Alexis Conneau, were slated to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs to continue their research and development efforts within the larger organization. ^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]}