A seven-month-old Paris startup just pulled in more seed funding than most companies raise across their entire venture lifecycle. Gradium, a voice AI company that spun out of the Kyutai research lab, has extended its seed round to over $100 million after adding roughly $30 million in fresh capital, with Nvidia joining as a new backer.
What Gradium actually does
Gradium builds ultra-low-latency voice technology. Think speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice cloning, and real-time translation models, all designed for developers building voice interfaces into consumer apps.
The company is led by CEO Neil Zeghidour and positions itself as a direct competitor to ElevenLabs, Deepgram, OpenAI’s voice products, and Mistral. It launched from stealth with production-ready models after just three months of development.
The initial $70 million seed round closed on December 2, 2025, led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo. DST Global, Eric Schmidt, and Xavier Niel also participated. The company emerged from the Kyutai lab, which itself was backed by Niel. Gradium did not disclose its valuation.
