Paris-based AI startup Gradium has secured a $70 million seed round

Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), stealthily launched on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from a group 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 voice language AI models designed to deliver audio at scale with extremely low latency – essentially, AI voices that respond almost instantly. It was founded just a few months ago, in September 2025, by Qotai founding member Neil Zgidor, who gained significant experience working with acoustic models as a researcher at Google DeepMind.

She says the startup’s goal is to make voice modeling faster and more accurate for developers. As a European startup, it launches with multilingual support: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with additional languages ​​to come.

Naturally, Gradium is in the running with a lot of competition. For starters, leading LLM companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta Llma, and Mistral have audio, speech recognition, and multimodal models. Then there are well-funded startups like ElevenLabs, and hundreds of voice/speech models on Hugging Face. Right now, there’s no shortage of options for a developer who needs AI-powered voice capabilities.

However, the need for what Gradium hopes to deliver – highly realistic voice expression and accuracy – will grow over time, as AI moves from scripted chats to AI agents and use cases expand from entertainment to business.