AI voice startup Gradium, a spinout of Paris-based non-profit AI lab Kyutai, has come out of stealth mode with a $70m seed round.
The fundraise, which was entirely equity funding, was led by US VC Firstmark and French investor Eurazeo. DST Global, Korelya Capital and Amplify Partners also participated, as well as French billionaires Xavier Niel and Rodolphe Saadé, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Gradium spun out from Kyutai, a non-profit lab launched in 2023 with €300m in backing from Niel, Saadé and Schmidt. Kyutai is dedicated to open source AI research, and has so far largely focused on “voice AI”.
The startup, which counts former researchers from Google DeepMind and Meta among its cofounders, is bringing some of Kyutai’s work into commercialisation. The launch comes as the sector heats up, with high-profile companies like OpenAI and ElevenLabs actively building voice AI technologies.
“We’re competing with the market’s leading players and we fully intend to take their place over the next year,” cofounder Neil Zeghidour tells Sifted.
Spinning out from Kyutai
In the two years since launching, Kyutai has released several AI models for voice applications such as conversational assistants, real-time speech translation and voice synthesis.
The models were released in open source as products of research projects, but commercial applications were authorised. Zeghidour, who is also one of the Kyutai’s cofounders, says the technology saw lots of commercial uptake.
“We realised our models were competitive with the whole industry, whether on transcription, synthesis, dialogue or translation,” says Zeghidour. “At the same time, we could see users couldn’t bring the models to the level of quality they needed.”
The opportunity to turn the technology into a viable commercial product became “obvious”, says Zeghidour, although “this was not at all the plan to start with.”
Gradium was cofounded in September by Zeghidour and fellow Kyutai scientists Laurent Mazaré and Alexandre Défossez, as well as former Google engineer Olivier Teboul. Kyutai is a shareholder in the company and Zeghidour says both organisations will remain close, with Gradium accessing the lab’s on-going research while creating commercial value for it.
“A non-profit is a difficult model to keep viable in the long term because of the huge resources needed to train AI,” says Zeghidour. “This will enable us to sustain non-profit research.”
Competing in voice AI
Gradium develops “audio language models” designed to transform large-language models (LLMs) into interactive AI voices. The technology is available in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Three months after launching, the startup has a dozen paying customers, according to Zeghidour, who are using the product for applications ranging from creating characters in video games to medical secretaries.
The company is entering a buzzy sector, which in Europe is currently led by UK and US-based voice AI startup ElevenLabs, last reported to be eyeing a valuation of upwards of $6bn. Sifted data shows AI-native startups dedicated to voice applications in Europe have raised nearly €600m so far in 2025, almost double the amount raised in 2024 (€327m).
But Zeghidour says the market is still open. “Today you have to pick between a high-quality voice interaction that is very expensive, meaning it can’t be scaled [...] or something scalable that has the same quality as an answering machine,” he says.
Gradium offers a high-quality product at a lower price than its competitors, says Zeghidour. But despite the ambition, he remains realistic.
“Although we have a proven technical advantage, we are conscious we are entering a market where there are big competitors,” says Zeghidour. “If we want to disrupt this, we have a very strong speed constraint.”
He adds: “We raised a considerable seed to give ourselves the opportunity to go fast from the beginning.”
