Gradium Raises $100M Seed Round, Adds Nvidia
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- Gradium raised $100 million in its seed round by re-opening to new investors including Nvidia, up from the $70 million it raised at its December stealth launch
- Gradium will use the fresh capital to open a Bay Area office, positioning itself closer to AI heavyweights Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI for talent competition
- Neil Zeghidour co-founded Gradium after spinning it out of French AI lab Kyutai, drawing on prior research roles at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook
- Gradium's product focus is ultra-low-latency audio models designed to eliminate the awkward pauses common in AI voice agent conversations
- ElevenLabs, valued at $11 billion in February, and Google's Gemini are named as Gradium's primary competitors in the voice AI space
- Renault is cited as a marquee customer Gradium has landed since its December launch, alongside earlier backers including Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel
Why it matters: A $100 million seed — with Nvidia writing in — arms a Paris-founded voice AI startup to compete head-to-head with ElevenLabs ($11B) and Google's Gemini, while its Bay Area office signals that proximity to US AI talent pools now outweighs staying in Europe for scaling-stage companies.
