"Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched out of stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from a who's who of investors. The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Niel, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt and other investors. Gradium has developed audio language AI models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency - essentially, AI voices that respond almost instantly."
"It was founded just a few months ago, in September, 2025, by Kyutai founding member Neil Zeghidour, who cut his teeth working with voice models as a researcher at Google DeepMind. The startup's goal, it says, is to make voice models speedier and more accurate for developers. And, as a European startup, it launched with multilingual support out of the gate: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with additional languages coming."
Gradium launched out of stealth with a $70 million seed round led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Xavier Niel, DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt and others. The company spun out of French AI lab Kyutai and was founded in September 2025 by Neil Zeghidour, a former Google DeepMind researcher. Gradium has developed audio language AI models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency, providing nearly instant responses. Gradium launched with multilingual support including English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and plans additional languages. Gradium enters a crowded field that includes frontier LLM companies and voice-focused startups.
Read at TechCrunch
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]