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 — emerged from stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round led by a prominent group of investors.

The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Niel, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt, and several additional backers.

Gradium has built audio-language AI models that deliver voice output at scale with extremely low latency, producing nearly instant responses. The company was founded just months ago, in September, by Neil Zeghidour, one of Kyutai’s founding members who previously worked on voice model research at Google DeepMind.

The startup says its mission is to make voice models faster and more accurate for developers. And as a European company, it launched with multilingual capabilities from the start: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with more languages on the way.

Gradium enters a space filled with intense competition. Major frontier LLM companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral have already developed voice and speech recognition systems and multimodal systems. There are also well-funded startups like ElevenLabs, along with hundreds of open-source voice and speech models on Hugging Face. Developers currently have no shortage of options for AI voice solutions.

Still, the demand for what Gradium aims to offer — highly realistic voice expression and improved accuracy — is expected to grow significantly as AI continues shifting from text interactions toward AI agents, and expands into applications ranging from entertainment to enterprise workflows.