Gladia was founded in 2022 by Jean-Louis Quéguiner and Jonathan Soto to make high-quality audio AI accessible to every developer through a single API. While speech-to-text has existed for years inside hyperscaler clouds, the founders saw that latency, language coverage, and pricing made those services awkward for the new wave of real-time voice products. Gladia rebuilt the stack around streaming performance and broad multilingual support, so a developer can drop in an API and get accurate transcripts in real time across dozens of languages and accents.
The core product is an audio-intelligence engine that handles transcription, translation, speaker diarization, and downstream analytics such as summarization and named-entity extraction. Rather than treating transcription as the end goal, Gladia frames audio as structured data: a call, meeting, or video becomes a searchable, analyzable object that other software can act on. This appeals strongly to the meeting-assistant, sales-intelligence, and media-localization categories that have exploded alongside generative AI.
In October 2024 Gladia announced a $16 million Series A led by XAnge, with participation from Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $20 million. The company reports serving tens of thousands of users and hundreds of enterprise clients including Calendly, VEED, Circleback, and Recall.
Gladia's bet is that real-time, multilingual audio processing is becoming core infrastructure for the next generation of voice-native applications, and that an independent, developer-first API can win share from the incumbents by being faster, broader in language coverage, and easier to adopt. The company continues to expand its model capabilities toward lower latency and richer audio understanding.