Gradium, a Paris-based startup building next-generation voice AI models, has closed a $100 million seed round after reopening the fundraising to new investors, including chip giant Nvidia. The company announced the expanded round on Thursday, marking one of the largest seed rounds in European AI history.

The fresh capital will fund a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area as Gradium looks to recruit engineers from the region’s deep talent pool. The startup’s move is a notable bet on proximity to the world’s leading AI labs—Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI—even as Paris remains a major European AI hub. Gradium first emerged from stealth in December with $70 million from backers including FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel.

The company was spun out of Kyutai, a French AI lab also co-founded by Neil Zeghidour, a researcher with stints at Google Brain, DeepMind, and Facebook. Gradium’s technology focuses on ultra-low latency audio models that generate natural-sounding speech without the awkward pauses common in AI voice agents. While it faces stiff competition from rivals like ElevenLabs—valued at $11 billion in February—and Google’s Gemini, Gradium has already signed major customers, including French automaker Renault.

Source: TechCrunch