Overview
- Gradium reopened and enlarged its seed round to $100 million after adding new capital that includes Nvidia as a strategic investor.
- The company said it will use the money to accelerate model research and product work and to open a Bay Area office to compete for talent and customers.
- Gradium has shipped low‑latency voice products such as Gradium Translate for real‑time speech translation, Phonon for on‑device text‑to‑speech, and the Gradbot open framework for voice agents.
- The startup was spun out of Paris research lab Kyutai and is led by co‑founder Neil Zeghidour and other researchers who built key audio models now used across the industry.
- Nvidia’s backing signals a closer tie between Gradium and GPU compute suppliers, which could shape where the company runs its models and influence compute dynamics across the crowded voice‑AI market.