Gradium secures $100M seed round with Nvidia backing to advance ultra-low latency voice AI

Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium raises $100M seed, backed by Nvidia

Gradium, a Paris-based startup that offers voice AI models, re-opened its seed round to new investors, including Nvidia, and has now raised $100 million total for the round, it said Thursday. The company is using the cash to open an office in the Bay Area and compete for talent there, "strengthening its position at the heart of the world's leading AI ecosystem," as Gradium put it. Paris is a major European hub for AI, so this is an interesting acknowledgement of the benefits for AI startups in being close to Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Gradium originally launched out of stealth in December with $70 million from a roster of impressive investors, including FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, and French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. The startup was spun out of French AI lab Kyutai (a lab backed by Niel). Both Kyutai and Gradium were co-founded by Neil Zeghidour, a researcher who previously worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook. Gradium is working on audio models that deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency, meaning AI voices that respond almost instantly, without that awkward pause that often creeps into AI agent conversations. The company has plenty of competition, though, from other voice AI startups like ElevenLabs, valued at $11 billion in February, to major model makers known for voice like Google's Gemini. But Gradium seems to be winning ground anyway. Since its December launch, Gradium says it has landed some big customers, including French auto manufacturer Renault.

Nvidia Joins $100 Million Bet on Gradium Voice AI | PYMNTS.com

As part of that extension, the company added new investors, including Nvidia, Gradium said in a Wednesday (July 8) blog post. The new funding will accelerate Gradium's AI research, product development, international expansion and its establishment of a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the post. Gradium was founded in September. Over the past few months, the company has expanded its capabilities across speech generation, speech recognition, translation and developer tooling; introduced a new generation of its flagship real-time text-to-speech model; and launched an ultra-low-latency speech-to-speech translation model called Gradium Translate, an on-device text-to-speech model for edge devices called Phonon and an open-source framework for building production-ready voice agents called Gradbot. The company has also gained enterprise customers in sectors such as customer experience, healthcare, media, AI agents and consumer applications, per the post. "Voice AI is reaching an inflection point," Gradium Co-Founder and CEO Neil Zeghidour said in the release. "Surpassing $100 million in funding and expanding our investors marks an important milestone for Gradium. It enables us to accelerate our roadmap, expand our Bay Area presence, and bring years of breakthrough research into products used by developers and enterprises around the world." When Gradium announced in December that it raised a $70 million seed round, Zeghidour told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview that its founders, former DeepMind and Meta researchers, had spent several years building algorithms that now underpin much of voice technology. "There are a lot of businesses around voice AI now, but developing very strong models for transcription, synthesis, the technological layer of AI, is very difficult," Zeghidour said. "Only a few people in the world know how to do it properly. In our case, we have invented most of the technological steps and algorithms that are powering current technology." PYMNTS reported in February that voice technology is becoming the foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce and that recent fundraising for voice technology firms and moves by tech giants point to an expanding role for voice in the digital economy.