Gradium raises $100 million seed, adds Nvidia as investor

Gradium added Nvidia to its investor roster as it reopened its seed round, bringing total funding to $100 million. The Paris voice-AI startup will use the new capital to open a Bay Area office and recruit talent there.

The extension adds about $30 million to the $70 million seed Gradium announced when it came out of stealth on December 2, 2025. That first tranche was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Korelya Capital, Amplify Partners, Liquid2 and Drysdale Ventures, alongside angels including Yann LeCun, Olivier Pomel, Thomas Wolf, Ilkka Paananen, Guillermo Rauch and Mehdi Ghissassi.

Gradium was founded in September 2025 and spun out of Kyutai, the French non-profit AI research lab. Its founding team includes Neil Zeghidour, who is chief executive and previously worked at Meta and Google DeepMind, Olivier Teboul, the chief technology officer and a former Google Brain researcher, Laurent Mazaré, the chief coding officer who came from DeepMind and Jane Street, and Alexandre Défossez, the chief scientific officer and a former Meta researcher.

Gradium builds audio language models for real-time voice interactions, with ultra-low-latency speech-to-text and text-to-speech across English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese. It generated revenue within weeks of founding and won early users in gaming, AI agents, customer care, language learning and healthcare. Its models can support instant voice cloning from a 10-second sample, smart turn-taking, code-switching and sessions lasting up to 300 seconds.