Meta has acquired California-based voice AI company PlayAI, a startup co-founded by Egyptian engineer Mahmoud Felfel and Hammad Syed, in a deal that further intensifies the race to own next-generation multimodal interfaces. While financial terms were not disclosed, the acquisition comes just months after PlayAI raised $21 million in seed funding from Kindred Ventures, 500 Global, Y Combinator, and others.
PlayAI has made a name for itself with Play Dialog, a multi-turn speech model trained on hundreds of millions of conversations. Its core advantage lies in its ability to understand context, respond with emotional nuance, and switch fluidly between languages — a key differentiator as tech giants push to make AI interactions feel more “human.” Independent testing cited by the company suggested that 7 out of 10 participants preferred Play Dialog to competing models.
The company’s broader product suite includes Play 3.0 mini, a fast, multilingual text-to-speech engine, a no-code platform for building voice agents, and Playnote, a recently launched tool likened to “NotebookLM but with any voice, custom prompts, and API access.” To date, PlayAI claims to have served nearly 40,000 customers through its real-time APIs and platforms.
Meta has confirmed that the full PlayAI team will join its internal AI unit, reporting directly to leadership responsible for Meta AI, AI characters, wearables, and voice-driven content tools. In internal memos, Meta described PlayAI’s platform as strategically aligned with its ambition to dominate the future of multimodal and interactive AI, particularly as it develops character-based agents and audio-native experiences across its apps and devices.
For Felfel, a graduate of Egypt’s Mansoura University, who previously worked as a software engineer at Dubai-based Dubizzle, the acquisition marks a rare founder exit for the MENA diaspora in a core AI field. He and Syed started PlayAI in 2020 after moving to the U.S., bootstrapping the company’s early development before securing seed backing from a roster of top global investors including Race Capital, Soma Capital, and Pioneer Fund.
Meta’s acquisition comes amid a broader wave of AI consolidation, as the company races to close ground with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
