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Meta Reportedly Planning to Acquire Startup PlayAI and Some of Its Employees

Meta Reportedly Planning to Acquire Startup PlayAI and Some of Its Employees

Meta’s decision to purchase PlayAI is said to be aimed at acquiring AI talent.

Written by Akash Dutta, Edited by Siddharth Suvarna | Updated: 27 June 2025 18:28 IST

Meta Reportedly Planning to Acquire Startup PlayAI and Some of Its Employees

Photo Credit: Reuters

PlayAI specialises in real-time conversational agents and voice interfaces

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Highlights

PlayAI was founded in 2019
Meta’s acquisition deal is said to include the startup’s top talent
The company reportedly wants to grow its AI division

Meta is reportedly planning to acquire the Palo Alto, California-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup PlayAI. As per the report, the acquisition is aimed at bolstering its AI division to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google. The Menlo Park-based social media giant has been aggressively pushing out new AI models and AI features for its platforms. The reported acquisition plans could help the company gain more employees skilled in AI, as well as the startup's in-house technology stack.

Meta to Reportedly Acquire PlayAI

According to a Bloomberg report, the tech giant is considering purchasing PlayAI. The AI startup was founded in 2019 by Hammad Syed and Mahmoud Felfel. It specialises in building real-time conversational agents, voice interfaces, and in-house AI voice models. Citing unnamed people familiar with the matter, the report claimed that the move to acquire the startup comes from Meta's desire to hire top talent in the AI space.

The acquisition deal, which is yet to be finalised, reportedly also includes a provision to hire some of the startup's employees. While the acquisition is expected to be completed soon, terms can still change, claimed the report. Notably, the financial terms of the deal are currently not known.

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Meta appears to be actively looking for AI startups to acquire. Several reports earlier this month claimed that Mark Zuckerberg's team held meetings with Perplexity to discuss a possible acquisition. The company has reportedly also made attempts to acquire Runway AI, a startup focused on developing AI models for video generation.

Apart from adding more AI talent to its team, the acquisition of PlayAI can also help Meta in other ways. The social media giant recently added a two-way voice conversation feature to its chatbot, however, in terms of end product, it is just a low-latency text-to-speech (TTS) tool. Compared to competitors such as ChatGPT or Gemini, this is one area where Meta AI is significantly behind.

However, this can change with the acquisition of PlayAI, which specialises in building AI voice generation models and voice interfaces. With this capability, the social media giant can scale up its own AI infrastructure and provide a voice experience that sounds more expressive and human-like.

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Further reading: Meta, PlayAI, AI, Artificial Intelligence

Akash Dutta Email Akash Dutta

Akash Dutta is a Chief Sub Editor at Gadgets 360. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technological developments and loves reading about emerging fields such as AI, metaverse, and fediverse. In his free time, he can be seen supporting his favourite football club - Chelsea, watching movies and anime, and sharing passionate opinions on food. More