Gladia Raises $16M for Multilingual Real-Time AI Transcription and Analytics

Gladia raises $16M for AI transcription and analytics

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Gladia, an AI transcription and audio intelligence provider, has raised $16 million in funding. The Paris, France-based company will use the funding to develop an end-to-end audio infrastructure - starting with a new real-time audio transcription and analytics engine - enabling voice-first platforms to deliver more value to their users across borders with cutting-edge AI. It's a challenge to rivals such as Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai, as well as other AI-based services that transcribe voice conversations to text. In an interview with VentureBeat, CEO Jean-Louis Quéguiner explained to me why he started the company. "As you can hear from a beautiful French accent, I'm not an English speaker and I was extremely frustrated with the accents," Quéguiner said. "That's why I founded the company." I got a demo of the AI transcription, and it worked in real time as Quéguiner spoke English with his heavy French accent. I'm used to services like Otter getting a lot of words wrong in a transcription, but in the first page of results from Gladia, I saw no errors. He also showed how he could speak two different languages and the system could shift from one language to another as needed. XAnge led the round, with participation by Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital. Founded in 2022, Gladia has now raised a total of $20.3 million, with earlier seed investments headed by New Wave, Sequoia Capital (as part of the First Sequoia Arc program), Cocoa, and GFC. Gladia recently was selected to participate in the AWS generative AI accelerator program. "Gladia represents the qualities we like to champion at XAnge: a bold, global tech team at the forefront of AI innovation, with a proven business model to unlock new opportunities across industries," said Alexis du Peloux, partner at XAnge, in a statement. "In a fast-paced AI environment, Jean-Louis Quéguiner and his team have executed extremely well, and we are proud to back Gladia for the Series A." Given that most speech recognition models today are trained predominantly on English audio data and are therefore inherently biased, Gladia prioritized building the first real-time product that is truly multilingual. The new fine-tuned engine delivers advanced real-time transcription in over 100 languages, along with enhanced support for accents and the unique ability to adapt to different languages on the fly. Gladia's new engine is unique in its ability to extract insights from a call -- like the caller's sentiment, key information, and conversation summary -- in real-time. This means it takes less than a second to generate both transcript and insights from a call or meeting using Gladia. New real-time AI transcription Building an accurate, low-latency, and multilingual engine in-house is a complex and resource-intensive task. It requires extensive expertise in language understanding, real-time data handling, with continuous optimization and maintenance. Real-time models require more computing power and may struggle to produce accurate output immediately due to limited context. Gladia's new product allows companies to bypass these challenges. The real-time speech-to-text engine boasts an industry-leading latency of under 300 milliseconds without compromising accuracy, regardless of the language, geography, or tech stack used. "Companies are spending valuable time and resources trying to incorporate multiple AI functions into their existing platforms," said Jonathan Soto, CTO of Gladia, in a statement. "Our single API is compatible with all existing tech stacks and protocols, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch, and Asterisk. This allows us to easily integrate real-time transcription and analysis into our customers' AI platforms, so they can focus on delivering the best services to their end users." What's ahead The company's first async transcription and audio intelligence API launched in June 2023 and was based on a proprietary version of Whisper ASR. It rapidly gained traction in the enterprise market, particularly with meeting recorders and note-taking assistants. The API is now adopted by over 600 customers around the world, including Attention, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO and has more than 70,000 users. "Gladia's technology allows companies in vertical markets that need cutting-edge real-time transcription, including sales enablement and contact center platform, to shift seamlessly from manual post-call processing to proactive, low-latency workflows," Quéguiner said. "Whether it's automated CRM enrichment or real-time guidance for support agents, Gladia is designed to help businesses operate smarter and more efficiently in record time, without requiring AI expertise in-house." Gladia will use the new capital to advance its R&D efforts and soon bring to market a one-stop AI toolkit for audio and expand its product offering with additional à la carte models -- including large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). With several design partners in the contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) segment, the company is currently piloting an agent-assist solution powered by Gladia's real-time AI engine. Additionally, Gladia will continue to expand its talent base as it prepares for international expansion. "We are multilingual, and we have something that is called 'code switching,' which makes it unique," Quéguiner said. "You can start with the language and switch to another." He went on to show me that he could start a call in English and initiate the transcription. Then he spoke French words, and the model correctly translated it in French. "Keep in mind that [others] are not real time right now, and this one is real time," he said. "Usually, real time is a little bit less accurate. You can also have your own custom vocabulary in real time, which is pretty unusual, with us. We have the capability to extract some real-time insights." The service has an AI summarizer, and it will have new optional features in the coming months. Quéguiner said that his service can also get acronyms right and detect the switch to another language. "The model we use is very similar to LLMs (large language models). It has no code decoder architecture, which is not the case for most of the models that you've seen with Fireflies, for instance. The market includes "meeting recorders," Quéguiner said. The results can be passed on to real-time insights, which can help people like sales leads close deals faster. The company also works with Call Centers, giving them 30% faster time to completion when they are on the phone thanks to better accuracy. The company will charge a flat fee such as a per-hour pricing.

French AI startup Gladia raises $16M and launches multilingual real-time transcription engine - SiliconANGLE

French AI startup Gladia raises $16M and launches multilingual real-time transcription engine French artificial intelligence transcription and audio intelligence startup Gladia SAS announced today that it has raised $16 million in new funding and launched a multilingual real-time audio transcription and analytics engine. Founded in 2022, Gladia aims to help companies leverage cutting-edge AI and retrieve actionable insights from audio data. The company's application programming interface supports advanced speech recognition features in more than 100 languages, with exceptional accuracy and asynchronous and real-time transcription. Gladia's speech recognition tools seek to tackle the issue wherein most speech recognition models today are trained predominantly on English audio data and, at least according to Gladia, are "inherently biased." Gladia's solutions, in contrast, have been built to be truly multilingual, with its new fine-tuned engine debuting today offering advanced real-time transcription in more than 100 languages, along with enhanced support for accents and the ability to adapt to different languages on the fly. The new engine is able to extract insights from calls, such as the caller's sentiment, key information and conversation summary, in real time, taking less than a second to generate both transcript and insights from a call or meeting using Gladia. The new product also overcomes challenges such as language understanding and real-time data handling with continuous optimization and maintenance. The real-time speech-to-text engine has a latency of under 300 milliseconds without compromising accuracy, regardless of the language, geography, or tech stack used. "Our single API is compatible with all existing tech stacks and protocols, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch and Asterisk," said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Soto. "This allows us to easily integrate real-time transcription and analysis into our customers' AI platforms so they can focus on delivering the best services to their end users." The company's first async transcription and audio intelligence API launched in June 2023 and has gained traction in the enterprise market, particularly with meeting recorders and note-taking assistants. The API is now used by more than 600 customers around the world, including Attention Inc., Circleback Inc., Method Financial Inc., Recall AI Inc., Sana Labs AB and VEED.IO Ltd. The $16 million Series A funding round was led by XAnge SAS, with Illuminate Financial Management LLP, XTX Ventures Ltd., Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures SARL, Roosh Ventures GmbH and Soma Capital also participating. The new funding will be used for research and development, to soon bring to market a one-stop AI toolkit for audio and for Gladia to expand its product offering with additional à-la-carte models -- including large language models and retrieval-augmented generation.

Gladia believes real-time processing is the next frontier of audio transcription APIs

French startup Gladia, which offers a speech-recognition application programming interface (API), has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round. Essentially, Gladia's API lets you turn any audio file into text with a high level of accuracy and low turnaround time. While Amazon, Microsoft and Google all offer speech-to-text APIs as part of their cloud-hosting product suites, they don't perform as well as newer models offered by specialized startups. There has been tremendous progress in this field over the past couple of years, especially after the release of Whisper by OpenAI. Gladia competes with other well-funded companies in the space, such as AssemblyAI, Deepgram and Speechmatics. Gladia originally offered a fine-tuned version of Whisper's speech-to-text model with some much needed improvements. For instance, the startup supports diarization out of the box -- it can detect when there are multiple speakers in a conversation and separate the recording, and transcribed text, depending on who's talking. Gladia supports 100 languages and a wide variety of accents. This reporter can confirm that it works, as we've been using Gladia to transcribe some interviews, and accents weren't an issue. The startup offers its speech-to-text model as a hosted API that users can leverage in their own applications and services. Over 600 companies use Gladia, including several meeting recorders and note-taking assistants like Attention, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana and Veed.io. That particular use case is interesting, because many companies have to chain API calls. They first turn speech into text, which they then feed into a large language model (LLM), such as GPT-4o or ‎Claude 3.5 Sonnet, to extract knowledge from large walls of text. With the new funding, Gladia wants to simplify that pipeline by integrating audio intelligence and LLM-based tasks in a single API call. For instance, a customer could get a conversation summary generated from a handful of bullet points without having to rely on a third-party LLM API. The other issue that Gladia is looking to solve is latency. You may have seen some demos of real-time audio conversations with an AI-based calling agent (11x has a good demo on its website), and these systems have to be able to transcribe in near real time to make such conversations sound as human-like as possible. "We realized that real time wasn't very good in terms of quality in the market in general. And people had a weird use case. They were doing real-time processing, and then they were grabbing the audio and running it in batch. We wondered: 'Why are you doing this?' They told us: 'The quality isn't good in real-time processing, so we transcribe it in batch afterwards,'" co-founder and CEO Jean-Louis Quéguiner (pictured above; right) told TechCrunch. Gladia chose to tackle this problem, and it can currently transcribe a live conversation with a latency of under 300 milliseconds. The company claims that the real-time processing is now more or less as good as the default, asynchronous batch transcription API, but it's hard for us to judge without some proper testing. As Quéguiner says, the startup is aiming for "batch quality with real-time capabilities." AI calling agents aside, you could imagine a call center using those real-time capabilities to help calling agents find relevant information in the middle of a call. "Our single API is compatible with all existing tech stacks and protocols, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch and Asterisk," co-founder and CTO Jonathan Soto (pictured above; left) said in a statement. XAnge is leading the Series A funding round. Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures and Soma Capital also participated. Gladia believes we are on the brink of a "ChatGPT moment" for audio applications. GPT technology has been around for years, but ChatGPT really popularized LLMs with its consumer chat-like interface. As Apple or Google start including transcription models within iOS or Android, consumers will start to understand the value of automated transcription within the apps they use. Developers will likely then integrate audio features in their products, and that's where API providers like Gladia will come in.

Gladia Raises $16 Million in Series A Funding: Launches the First Multilingual Real-Time Audio Transcription and Analytics Engine

Funding will accelerate Gladia's transition from a speech-to-text API to an end-to-end audio infrastructure provider for use cases like agent assistance for contact center platforms, sales enablement tools and AI meeting assistants. PARIS, Oct. 15, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Gladia, an AI transcription and audio intelligence provider, has completed a USD $16 million Series A funding round. The company will use the funding to develop an end-to-end audio infrastructure - starting with a new real-time audio transcription and analytics engine - enabling voice-first platforms to deliver more value to their users across borders with cutting-edge AI. The Series A funding round was led by XAnge, with participation by Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital. Founded in 2022, Gladia has now raised a total of USD $20.3 million, with earlier seed investments headed by New Wave, Sequoia Capital (as part of the First Sequoia Arc program), Cocoa, and GFC. "Gladia represents the qualities we like to champion at XAnge: a bold, global tech team at the forefront of AI innovation, with a proven business model to unlock new opportunities across industries," said Alexis du Peloux, Partner, XAnge. "In a fast-paced AI environment, Jean-Louis Quéguiner and his team have executed extremely well, and we are proud to back Gladia for the Series A." "I founded Gladia for a very personal reason - I was frustrated that existing audio transcription services were not able to understand my French accent," explained Jean-Louis Quéguiner, CEO and Co-Founder, Gladia. "Our international team and customers often switch between languages during meetings, but finding a transcription solution that can handle different languages and accents simultaneously was impossible." Given that most speech recognition models today are trained predominantly on English audio data and are therefore inherently biased, Gladia prioritized building the first real-time product that is truly multilingual. The new fine-tuned engine delivers advanced real-time transcription in over 100 languages, along with enhanced support for accents and the unique ability to adapt to different languages on the fly. Gladia's new engine is unique in its ability to extract insights from a call -- like the caller's sentiment, key information, and conversation summary -- in real time. This means it takes less than a second to generate both transcript and insights from a call or meeting using Gladia. New Real-Time Product Building an accurate, low-latency, and multilingual engine in-house is a complex and resource-intensive task. It requires extensive expertise in language understanding, real-time data handling, with continuous optimization and maintenance. Real-time models require more computing power and may struggle to produce accurate output immediately due to limited context. Gladia's new product allows companies to bypass these challenges. The real-time speech-to-text engine boasts an industry-leading latency of under 300 milliseconds without compromising accuracy, regardless of the language, geography, or tech stack used. "Companies are spending valuable time and resources trying to incorporate multiple AI functions into their existing platforms," said Jonathan Soto, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Gladia. "Our single API is compatible with all existing tech stacks and protocols, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch, and Asterisk. This allows us to easily integrate real-time transcription and analysis into our customers' AI platforms, so they can focus on delivering the best services to their end users." What's Ahead The company's first async transcription and audio intelligence API launched in June 2023 and was based on a proprietary version of Whisper ASR. It rapidly gained traction in the enterprise market, particularly with meeting recorders and note-taking assistants. The API is now adopted by over 600 customers around the world, including Attention, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO and has more than 70,000 users. "Gladia's technology allows companies in vertical markets that need cutting-edge real-time transcription, including sales enablement and contact center platform, to shift seamlessly from manual post-call processing to proactive, low-latency workflows. Whether it's automated CRM enrichment or real-time guidance for support agents, Gladia is designed to help businesses operate smarter and more efficiently in record time, without requiring AI expertise in-house," Jean-Louis Quéguiner, CEO and Co-Founder, Gladia, explained. Gladia will use the new capital to advance its R&D efforts and soon bring to market a one-stop AI toolkit for audio and expand its product offering with additional à la carte models -- including large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). With several design partners in the contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) segment, the company is currently piloting an agent-assist solution powered by Gladia's real-time AI engine. Additionally, Gladia will continue to expand its talent base as it prepares for international expansion. About Gladia Gladia was founded in 2022 by Jean-Louis Queguiner and Jonathan Soto with a mission to help companies leverage cutting-edge AI and retrieve actionable insights from audio data. Its API supports advanced speech recognition features in over 100 languages, with exceptional accuracy and asynchronous and real-time transcription. Based in Paris, Gladia has grown to serve over 70,000 users and 600 enterprise customers, including Attention, Ausha, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO. More information can be found at Gladia's website, or on Twitter or LinkedIn. About XAnge XAnge is an early-stage investment fund with €650 million under management, based in Paris and Berlin. Its investment team supports European entrepreneurs who aim to transform everyday life through technology, investing amounts ranging from €500,000 to €10 million starting at the seed stage. With an investment thesis focused on making technology accessible to the widest audience, XAnge invests in sectors such as deeptech, healthcare, fintech, SaaS, and e-commerce. XAnge has supported companies like Lydia (Finance), Welcome to the Jungle (Human Resources), Believe (Music), MrSpex (eCommerce), and Ledger (Cryptocurrency). XAnge is the innovation brand of the Siparex Group. For more information, visit www.xange.vc Media Contacts: Inquiries in English: Grace Halvorsen [email protected] Inquiries in French: Anna Jelezovskaia +33.766.868.657 [email protected] View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gladia-raises-16-million-in-series-a-funding-launches-the-first-multilingual-real-time-audio-transcription-and-analytics-engine-302275501.html SOURCE Gladia Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs