NVIDIA invests in Gradium, the AI voice born from Kyutai

NVIDIA invests in Gradium, the Kyutai voice AI spin-off, raising its total seed funding to over $100 million to expand real-time voice infrastructure.

Gradium, a young voice AI company spun out of the Parisian lab Kyutai, welcomes NVIDIA as an investor, bringing its cumulative funding to over one hundred million dollars, seven months after its launch.

Precision matters: this is not a new hundred-million-dollar round, but an extension of its seed funding. After an initial seventy-million-dollar round in late 2025, led by FirstMark and Eurazeo with Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, and Eric Schmidt among its backers, the extension, notably driven by NVIDIA, is close to thirty million dollars. The company is not disclosing the exact amount or its valuation. These funds are earmarked for research, product development, international expansion, and the opening of an office in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Founded by Neil Zeghidour, Laurent Mazaré, Olivier Teboul, and Alexandre Défossez, researchers from Kyutai, Gradium is building the infrastructure for real-time voice applications: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and low-latency conversational AI. In recent months, it has released several new products, including a new generation of its flagship text-to-speech model, semantic end-of-turn detection (understanding when a user has finished their thought rather than just detecting silence), a voice-to-voice translation model, Gradium Translate, an embedded model for edge devices, Phonon, and an open-source framework for voice agents, GradBot.

Its CEO, Neil Zeghidour, highlights a sustained publication pace, presented as one model per month, whereas competitors' cycles often span six to twelve months. Kyutai, from which Gradium is the commercial offshoot, is a non-profit laboratory launched in Paris in 2023 with three hundred million euros also contributed by Niel, Saadé, and Schmidt.