Gradium secures USD $70 million to launch AI voice platform
Gradium, a Paris-based specialist in real-time artificial intelligence voice technology, has emerged from stealth with USD $70 million in seed funding to commercialise its audio language models for enterprise and developer use.
Investment round
The substantial seed round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo. DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Korelya Capital, Amplify Partners and other investors also took part.
The company's funding round stands out in the context of early-stage AI ventures, reflecting a strong degree of investor confidence in voice-based technology platforms.
Core technology
Gradium's main product is its audio language model, which functions as an audio-centric alternative to text-based large language models. The technology is designed to deliver expressive, low-latency voice-based interactions at scale and to address a range of voice tasks from transcription to interaction.
The founding team - Neil Zeghidour, Olivier Teboul, Laurent Mazaré, and Alexandre Défossez - previously held roles at Meta, Google DeepMind, Jane Street and Google Brain. The team claims a concentration of generative audio expertise drawing on over a decade of research, including experience at Kyutai, a non-profit AI research laboratory focused on frontier research.
Commercial uptake
Gradium reports it began generating revenue within weeks of its formation.
Early users of the platform include companies in gaming, AI agents, customer service, language education, and healthcare. The technology's applications focus on enabling more natural machine voice interactions in these markets.
Product features
The platform offers multilingual support in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with more languages planned.
It is available under a range of access models, from developer usage to enterprise-scale deployment. Gradium cites a ongoing collaboration with Kyutai for ongoing access to research outcomes in generative audio, with a stated strategy of rapidly moving academic breakthroughs into production systems.
Industry context
"Today, the potential of voice AI is still largely untapped: we're at the stage where chatbots were before LLMs," said Neil Zeghidour, Founder and CEO, Gradium.
"Existing systems remain brittle, costly, and unable to deliver truly natural interactions. At Gradium, our goal is to make voice the primary interface between humans and machines. To achieve this, we're eliminating the long-standing trade-off between quality and scalability: combining ultra-realistic expressivity, accurate transcription, and ultra-low-latency interactions at a price point that finally makes high-quality voice ubiquitous."
