Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai, launched out of stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from a notable group of investors. The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt, and others. Backed by Niel, Kyutai is known for its open-source AI research.
Gradium has developed audio language AI models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency. This means the AI voices respond almost instantly. The company was founded just a few months ago, in September 2025, by Kyutai founding member Neil Zeghidour, who previously worked on voice models as a researcher at Google DeepMind.
The startup’s goal is to make voice models faster and more accurate for developers. As a European company, it launched with multilingual support for English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with plans to add more languages soon.
Of course, Gradium is entering a competitive field. Major frontier AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral all have voice, speech recognition, and multimodal models. There are also well-funded startups like ElevenLabs and hundreds of voice and speech models available on platforms like Hugging Face. Currently, developers have no shortage of options for AI voice capabilities.
That said, the demand for what Gradium hopes to offer—ultra-realistic voice expression and accuracy—is expected to grow. This need will increase as AI evolves from typed chats to interactive AI agents and expands into diverse use cases spanning entertainment and professional work.