Gradium is a Paris-based voice AI company that emerged from stealth in December 2025 as a commercial spinout of Kyutai, the non-profit AI lab funded by Iliad founder Xavier Niel, CMA CGM's Rodolphe Saadé and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The startup builds production-grade speech-to-text and text-to-speech models engineered for ultra-low latency, with the goal of becoming the default voice layer for AI agents, contact centers and consumer applications.
The founding team is unusually senior for a company only months old. CEO Neil Zeghidour previously led voice AI research at Google DeepMind, while Chief Scientist Alexandre Défossez came from Meta FAIR. Both were core contributors to Kyutai's open-source Moshi voice model. CTO Olivier Teboul (ex-Google Brain) and Chief Coding Officer Laurent Mazaré (ex-DeepMind and Jane Street) round out a research-heavy leadership group.
Gradium's initial product line covers English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, with additional languages on the roadmap. The company emphasises full duplex, sub-300-millisecond responsiveness and natural prosody as differentiators against incumbents like ElevenLabs, OpenAI's voice models, Deepgram and Cartesia, especially in European deployments that demand multilingual coverage and data residency.
In December 2025 Gradium announced a $70M all-equity seed round co-led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Xavier Niel, DST Global Partners, Eric Schmidt, Korelya Capital and Amplify Partners. The angel roster includes Yann LeCun, Datadog's Olivier Pomel, Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf, Supercell's Ilkka Paananen and Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, underscoring the strategic importance European investors attach to a homegrown voice AI champion.
The company is positioning itself as Europe's answer to US voice AI labs at a moment when contact centers, agentic applications and consumer voice assistants are all converging onto LLM-driven stacks. Its early focus will be developer APIs, with deeper enterprise packaging expected to follow as the team grows beyond its founding research core.