Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched out of stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from a who’s who of investors.
The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Niel, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt, and other investors.
Gradium has developed audio language AI models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency — essentially, AI voices that respond almost instantly. It was founded just a few months ago, in September, by Kyutai founding member Neil Zeghidour, who cut his teeth working with voice models as a researcher at Google DeepMind.
The startup’s goal, it says, is to make voice models speedier and more accurate for developers. And, as a European startup, it launched with multilingual support out of the gate: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with additional languages coming.
Of course, Gradium is entering a race with plenty of competition. For starters, the frontier LLM companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Llama, and Mistral all have voice, speech recognition, and multimodal models. Then there are well-funded startups like ElevenLabs, and hundreds of voice/speech models on Hugging Face. Right now, there’s no shortage of options for a developer needing AI voice capabilities.
That said, the need for what Gradium hopes to offer — ultra-realistic voice expression and accuracy — will only grow over time, as AI moves from typed chats to AI agents and expands into use cases from entertainment to work.
