Nvidia Boosts Gradium: Voice AI Surpasses 100 Million

The young French company specializing in voice artificial intelligence, Gradium, recently announced that it has raised approximately $30 million in additional funding. This new injection of funds brings the total of its financing round to over $100 million, just seven months after its founding. Among the new investors is the American semiconductor giant, Nvidia. However, Gradium has not disclosed the identities of the other participants in this fundraising round or its current valuation.

This new funding round adds to an initial tranche of $70 million obtained at the end of the previous year. This first round was led by the American venture capital fund Firstmark and the French investor Eurazeo. Other influential figures such as French billionaires Xavier Niel and Rodolphe Saadé, as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, are also among the financial backers of the company.

Gradium was born from the non-profit AI research lab Kyutai, based in Paris. Founded in 2023 with financial support of €300 million from Niel, Saadé, and Schmidt, Kyutai is dedicated to open-source AI research, with a particular focus on voice technologies.

What does Gradium do?

Gradium focuses on developing tools that enable developers to create innovative voice applications. The company offers artificial intelligence models for real-time speech synthesis and speech recognition, as well as voice translation tools. It also develops models tailored for smaller devices such as laptops and smartphones.

Additionally, Gradium has developed an open-source framework designed to simplify the creation of voice agents by developers. According to the company, this technology is used by businesses across various sectors, ranging from customer service to healthcare, for applications as diverse as medical secretaries or character creation for video games.

With this new funding round, Gradium plans to open an office in San Francisco and accelerate its research and product development efforts.

Voice AI on the Rise

The field of voice artificial intelligence is experiencing rapid growth, particularly in Europe, where the London-based scaleup ElevenLabs aims for a valuation of $22 billion in the secondary market. Meanwhile, American AI giants like OpenAI are also investing in the development of voice technologies.

Data from Sifted reveals that European startups specializing in voice applications raised €536 million in the first half of 2026, an increase of nearly 50% compared to the €360 million raised during the same period in 2025.

"The voice AI sector is experiencing strong acceleration," said Neil Zeghidour, co-founder of Gradium, to Sifted. "Thousands of startups and companies are using voice models to create new applications, but there are fewer than a dozen players capable of training these models at scale."

Competition is therefore fierce regarding the models themselves, although it is concentrated among a limited number of players. "We release new models almost every month, whereas development cycles are generally much longer—between six and twelve months—for some of our competitors."