Voice AI startup Gradium raises $100M seed round, adds Nvidia

Gradium, a Paris-based startup that builds voice AI models, said Thursday that it has reopened its seed round to new investors, including Nvidia, bringing the round’s total to $100 million. The company plans to put the new capital toward opening an office in the Bay Area, where it intends to compete for talent — a move Gradium described as “strengthening its position at the heart of the world’s leading AI ecosystem.”

The new money builds on Gradium’s original stealth-mode raise of $70 million in December, which came from a group of investors that included FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, and DST Global Partners, as well as individual backers Eric Schmidt and French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel. Gradium itself was spun out of Kyutai, a French AI lab that Niel also backs. Neil Zeghidour — a researcher who previously worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook — co-founded both Kyutai and Gradium.

Gradium builds audio models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency, the kind of AI voices that respond almost instantly and avoid the awkward pause that often creeps into AI agent conversations. That puts the company up against a crowded field: voice AI startups such as ElevenLabs, valued at $11 billion in February, and major model makers with voice products of their own, such as Google’s Gemini. Even so, Gradium says it has landed significant customers since its December launch, including French automaker Renault.

Why it matters

Paris is one of Europe’s biggest AI hubs, so Gradium’s move to open in the Bay Area is a notable bet that proximity to Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI outweighs the cost of competing directly with them for talent.