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Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai<\/a> (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched out of stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from a who\u2019s who of investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Niel, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt and other investors.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gradium<\/a> has developed audio language AI models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency \u2014 essentially, AI voices that respond almost instantly. It was founded just a few months ago,\u00a0in September, 2025, by Kyutai founding member Neil Zeghidour, who cut his teeth working with voice models as a researcher at Google DeepMind.<\/p>\n The startup\u2019s goal, it says, is to make voice models speedier and more accurate for developers. And, as a European startup, it launched with multilingual support out of the gate: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, with additional languages coming.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, Gradium is entering a race with plenty of competition. For starters, the frontier LLM companies like OpenAI,<\/a> Anthropic<\/a>, Meta Llma<\/a>, and Mistral<\/a> all have voice, speech recognition, and multimodal models. Then there are well-funded startups like ElevenLabs<\/a>, and hundreds of voice\/speech models on Hugging Face. Right now, there\u2019s no shortage of options for a developer needing AI voice capabilities.\u00a0<\/p>\n That said, the need for what Gradium hopes to offer \u2014 ultra-realistic voice expression and accuracy \u2014 will only grow over time, as AI moves from typed chats to AI agents and expands into use cases from entertainment to work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n