Gradium Secures $70M to Advance Cutting-Edge Audio AI Technologies

Gradium, a rapidly emerging French AI startup, has secured $70 million in seed funding, marking one of the most significant investments in the audio-AI sector this year. The round brought together a powerful roster of global tech leaders, including Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and Xavier Niel, the French telecom billionaire, alongside major investment firms such as FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, Rodolphe Saadé, and several others.

Founded by a team of engineers and researchers with backgrounds at Google, Meta, and Jane Street, Gradium is building specialized audio language AI models capable of generating speech, transforming vocal tone, and accurately understanding spoken language — all with ultra-low latency designed for instantaneous responses at scale.

The company originated as a commercial spin-out of Kyutai, the nonprofit AI research lab established in 2023 with an initial budget of €300 million to support open-source AI innovation. Kyutai recently introduced Moshi, an advanced audio model that processes speech directly rather than relying on traditional text-to-speech pipelines, significantly reducing latency and improving real-time performance.

Gradium aims to transform these research breakthroughs into enterprise-grade commercial solutions, with a strong focus on voice expression accuracy, tone precision, and real-time interaction speed. According to founder and CEO Neil Zeghidour, these remain critical weaknesses across existing voice AI systems.

Despite fierce competition from major players such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and fast-growing startups like ElevenLabs—now valued at $6.6 billion—Gradium is betting on delivering superior quality, faster response times, and highly adaptable multilingual capabilities.

Since emerging from stealth in September, the company has launched its product with support for English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with plans to expand to additional languages soon.