Gradium announced that it extended its funding to $100 million just seven months after launch. The extension of the company’s seed financing includes new investors such as NVIDIA.
The funding will support AI research, product development, international expansion, and the establishment of a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area. Gradium said the expansion strengthens its position within the global AI ecosystem and brings it closer to developers and companies building the next generation of AI agents.
Founded in September 2025, Gradium was created by researchers behind Kyutai, the AI research lab known for pioneering real-time speech systems. The company was founded by Neil Zeghidour, Laurent Mazaré, Olivier Teboul, and Alexandre Défossez, whose work has helped shape the field of generative audio.
Gradium develops foundational infrastructure for real-time voice AI. Its technology enables developers and enterprises to build natural, low-latency voice experiences through streaming speech-to-text, expressive text-to-speech, voice generation, and conversational intelligence.
The funding milestone follows several product and research advances across the company’s platform. Gradium has expanded its capabilities in speech generation, speech recognition, translation, and developer tooling.
Among its recent updates, Gradium introduced a new generation of its flagship real-time text-to-speech model. The model is designed to deliver more natural speech and improved pronunciation of complex enterprise content such as acronyms, email addresses, phone numbers, and alphanumeric codes.
The company has also advanced real-time speech-to-text with semantic turn detection. This capability helps voice agents understand when a user has finished a thought rather than simply stopped speaking, enabling faster and more natural conversations.
Gradium recently launched Gradium Translate, an ultra-low-latency speech-to-speech translation model. It also introduced Phonon, an on-device text-to-speech model for edge devices, and GradBot, an open-source framework that allows developers to build production-ready voice agents with minimal code.
Together, these products support Gradium’s broader mission of building the foundational infrastructure for voice-native AI applications. The company believes voice will become a primary interface between people and intelligent systems as conversational AI adoption increases across enterprise and consumer markets.
Gradium said it has already attracted enterprise customers across customer experience, healthcare, media, AI agents, and consumer applications. The company also began generating revenue within weeks of launch.
The new Bay Area presence is expected to help Gradium work more closely with AI developers, enterprise customers, and partners in one of the world’s most active technology markets. The expansion also supports the company’s effort to bring years of frontier voice AI research into production-ready infrastructure.
KEY QUOTE:
“Voice AI is reaching an inflection point. 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.”
Neil Zeghidour, Co-Founder and CEO of Gradium
