Nvidia Backs French Voice AI Startup Gradium at $100M Seed

PARIS: Gradium extends its seed round past $100 million, adding roughly $30 million with Nvidia as the headline new investor. The company is seven months old.

The July 9 extension tops up a $70 million first tranche from December, led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo. DST Global, Eric Schmidt, and French billionaires Xavier Niel and Rodolphe Saadé backed that opening round. Valuation remains undisclosed.

What justifies seed money at this scale is the founding team’s paper trail. Neil Zeghidour, Laurent Mazaré, Olivier Teboul, and Alexandre Défossez spun Gradium out of Kyutai, the Niel-backed Paris research lab. Between them, they built EnCodec, SoundStream, and Moshi: the foundational research that most modern voice AI runs on, including systems at OpenAI. The people who invented the plumbing now want the market.

The product is speed. Gradium ships speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and real-time translation models with latency around 200 milliseconds in practice. That kills the awkward pause that makes most AI phone conversations feel like talking to a satellite. Moshi, the underlying research, was the first real-time full-duplex spoken language model.

Traction came fast. The company launched from stealth in December with production-ready models and says it generated revenue within weeks. Renault is already a customer. The new money funds a San Francisco Bay Area office, planting the French team inside the talent pool it competes for.

Competition is not gentle: ElevenLabs at $11 billion, Deepgram, Mistral, and OpenAI’s own voice stack. Yet capital keeps flooding the category. Rime raised $24 million this week for enterprise calls, and OpenAI’s GPT-Live now reaches 150 million weekly voice users.

Voice, long the neglected AI interface, is suddenly the crowded one.