Gradium, a Paris-based startup offering voice AI models, announced on Thursday that it has raised a total of $100 million in its seed round. Nvidia joined a roster of existing backers including FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, and French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. The company plans to use this capital to open an office in the Bay Area to compete for talent within the world’s leading AI ecosystem. This move acknowledges the strategic benefits of proximity to major players like Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI, even though Paris remains a major European hub for artificial intelligence development.
The firm was spun out of French AI lab Kyutai and is co-founded by Neil Zeghidour, a researcher formerly employed at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook. Gradium develops audio models designed to deliver voice output at scale with ultra-low latency, aiming to eliminate the awkward pauses common in AI agent conversations. Despite competition from entities such as ElevenLabs and Google’s Gemini, the startup reports significant traction. Since launching in stealth mode in December, Gradium has secured contracts with major clients including French auto manufacturer Renault.
* Original funding of $70 million came from a mix of venture capital and individual investors.
* The new capital specifically targets recruitment in the United States.
* Latency reduction is the core technical differentiator cited by the company.
