Gradium Expands to Silicon Valley After Extending Funding to $100 Million

Paris-based voice AI startup Gradium has extended its total funding to $100 million, adding new investors including NVIDIA just seven months after emerging from stealth. The company said the additional capital will be used to accelerate AI research, expand product development, strengthen its international presence, and establish a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The latest funding extension comes as Gradium looks to deepen its presence in one of the world's largest AI ecosystems while scaling its real-time voice AI platform for developers and enterprise customers.

Founded in September 2025 by researchers behind Kyutai, the AI research lab known for its work on real-time speech systems, Gradium focuses on foundational models and infrastructure for voice AI. The company develops technologies spanning streaming speech-to-text, text-to-speech, conversational intelligence, and speech translation that enable developers to build low-latency voice applications.

Alongside the funding extension, Gradium is opening a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area, marking its first major expansion outside France.

The company said the move is intended to strengthen its engineering and research capabilities while placing it closer to developers, enterprise customers, and the broader AI ecosystem. The expansion also supports Gradium's plans to scale its products globally as adoption of conversational AI continues to grow across industries.

The funding builds on Gradium's initial seed financing announced after its launch and broadens its investor base with the addition of NVIDIA.

Over the past several months, Gradium has expanded its portfolio across speech generation, recognition, translation, and developer tools.

Among the latest product updates is a new generation of its real-time text-to-speech model, designed to improve pronunciation of enterprise-specific content such as acronyms, email addresses, phone numbers, and alphanumeric codes while producing more natural speech.

The company has also enhanced its speech-to-text technology with semantic turn detection, allowing voice agents to recognise when a user has completed a thought instead of relying only on pauses in speech. According to Gradium, this helps make AI conversations more fluid and responsive.

More recently, the startup introduced Gradium Translate, a real-time speech-to-speech translation model, Phonon, an on-device text-to-speech model for edge devices, and GradBot, an open-source framework designed to help developers build production-ready voice agents with minimal code.

Together, these releases expand Gradium's platform across cloud and edge deployments while addressing different stages of voice AI application development.

Gradium said it began generating revenue within weeks of its launch and has attracted enterprise customers across customer experience, healthcare, media, AI agents, and consumer applications.

As organisations increasingly adopt conversational AI, the company believes voice interactions will become a more common interface between users and intelligent systems, creating demand for infrastructure capable of supporting real-time communication at scale.

The latest funding is expected to support continued investment in the company's research and commercial roadmap as it expands its global operations.

"Voice AI is reaching an inflection point," said Neil Zeghidour, co-founder and CEO, Gradium. "Surpassing $100 million in funding and expanding our investors marks an important milestone for Gradium. It enables us to accelerate our roadmap, expand our Bay Area presence, and bring years of breakthrough research into products used by developers and enterprises around the world."

Gradium was founded by Neil Zeghidour, Laurent Mazaré, Olivier Teboul, and Alexandre Défossez, researchers whose work has focused on generative audio and speech technologies.

The company says its objective is to translate advances from AI research into production-ready infrastructure that enables developers and enterprises to build voice-native applications with lower latency and improved conversational performance.

With the additional funding and its expansion into Silicon Valley, Gradium is positioning itself to further develop its voice AI platform while increasing its presence in international markets.