Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium nabs $70M seed
Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), secretly launched 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.
Gradient 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 2025, by Neil Zeghidour, founder of Kyutai, who cut his teeth working with voice models as a researcher at Google DeepMind.
The startup’s goal is to make voting models faster and more accurate for developers. And as a European startup, it launched with multilingual support: English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, with more languages to come.
Naturally, Gradium is participating in a race with a lot of competition. To start with, the groundbreaking LLM companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta LamaAnd Mistral they 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 provide – ultra-realistic voice expression and accuracy – will only increase over time, as AI moves from typed chats to AI agents and expands into use cases from entertainment to work.
