One of the biggest European startup stories of the year broke last week as Gradium brought in $70 million in seed funding. Neil Zeghidour, another major force in the tech industry and a member of Kyutai’s founding council, debuted Gradium in September 2025. The AI voice company is on a mission to spread innovation toward democratizing the humanization of AI voice. Headquartered in Paris, the worldwide race into a crowded and increasingly sophisticated field of dozens of high-quality voice and speech models is far from over.
What sets Gradium apart is that it was built to be multilingual from the start. The startup initially focuses on five major languages: English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. That said, Gradium is hard at work to add new languages and unlock access for a more diverse global audience. This is a wise strategy to prepare the company to take advantage of the increased interest in voice technology by businesses and government agencies alike.
At the heart of Gradium’s mission, delivering the nth degree in voice expression and fidelity. As we such increasingly more sophisticated and capable AI agents, the rush is on. This trend can be seen most notably in industries such as leisure and professional services. Gradium’s next generation technology was built with these dynamic use cases in mind, allowing you to deliver experiences that require impressive natural, engaging, and lifelike voice interactions.
Neil Zeghidour, our project lead, as a former AI researcher at Google DeepMind, is intimately familiar with the innovative and disruptive direction Gradium can take. With his deep experience in AI and machine learning, Zeghidour is committed to deliver a unique product. His aim, however, is not just to keep up with the latest products, but to redefine what is achievable with voice synthesis. The market is now inundated with hundreds of secondary voice and speech models hosted on repositories like Hugging Face. On top of that, well-resourced competitors, including startups such as ElevenLabs pose considerable challenges for newcomers like Gradium.
While it’s a crowded space, Gradium’s founders are confident that interest in what they have to offer will only increase. From small startups to global enterprises, organizations are scrambling to bring AI solutions into their business processes. Gradium’s technology brings the key foundational capabilities to address those needs. Whether it’s improving the realism of customer service chats or bringing a world of entertainment to life in new ways, the possibilities for these ultra-realistic AI voices are endless.
