Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI research lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched in stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from investors who know better than most.
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 a spoken language AI model designed to deliver audio at scale with ultra-low latency. That means an AI voice that responds almost instantly. It was founded just a few months ago in September 2025 by Neil Zeghidour, a founding member of Kyutai. Neil Zeghidour was a researcher at Google DeepMind, where he excelled at speech modeling.
The startup’s goal is to make voice models faster and more accurate for developers, the company said. As a European startup, we also have multilingual support for English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese out of the box, with more languages to come.
Of course, Gladium is competing in a highly competitive race. First, cutting-edge LLM companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Llma, and Mistral all have voice, speech recognition, and multimodal models. Additionally, there are well-funded startups like Eleven Labs and hundreds of voice/speech models on Hugging Face. Right now, there is no shortage of options for developers who need AI voice capabilities.
That said, as AI moves from input chat to AI agents, and use cases expand from entertainment to work, the need for what Gradium hopes to provide – hyper-realistic audio representation and accuracy – will only grow over time.
