Gradium, a Startup Spoon French AI lab out of Qitai (backed by French telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel), quietly launched on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from select investors.
The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Neal, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt and other investors.
gradium Audio language AI models have been developed designed to deliver voices 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 Quitai founding member Neil Zeghidour, who pursued his career working with voice models as a researcher at Google DeepMind.
It says the startup aims to make voice models faster and more accurate for developers. And, as a European startup, it launched with multilingual support: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with additional languages to follow.
Of course, Gradium is entering the race with plenty of competition. For starters, leading LLM companies like OpenAI, anthropic, meta llaAnd mistral All have voice, speech recognition, and multimodal models. Then there are well-funded startups like elevenlabsAnd hundreds of voice/speech models on Hugging Face. At the moment, there is no shortage of options for developers needing AI voice capabilities.
That said, the need for what Gradium hopes to offer – hyper-realistic voice expression and accuracy – will only increase over time, as AI moves from typed chat to AI agents and expands into use cases ranging from entertainment to work.
