Nvidia Joins $100 Million Bet on Gradium Voice AI
Voice AI model builder Gradium has announced that an extension of its seed financing brought its funding to $100 million.
As part of that extension, the company added new investors, including Nvidia, Gradium said in a Wednesday (July 8) blog post.
The new funding will accelerate Gradium’s AI research, product development, international expansion and its establishment of a new office in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the post.
Gradium was founded in September. Over the past few months, the company has expanded its capabilities across speech generation, speech recognition, translation and developer tooling; introduced a new generation of its flagship real-time text-to-speech model; and launched an ultra-low-latency speech-to-speech translation model called Gradium Translate, an on-device text-to-speech model for edge devices called Phonon and an open-source framework for building production-ready voice agents called Gradbot.
The company has also gained enterprise customers in sectors such as customer experience, healthcare, media, AI agents and consumer applications, per the post.
“Voice AI is reaching an inflection point,” Gradium Co-Founder and CEO Neil Zeghidour said in the release. “Surpassing $100 million in funding and expanding our investors marks an important milestone for Gradium. It enables us to accelerate our roadmap, expand our Bay Area presence, and bring years of breakthrough research into products used by developers and enterprises around the world.”
When Gradium announced in December that it raised a $70 million seed round, Zeghidour told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview that its founders, former DeepMind and Meta researchers, had spent several years building algorithms that now underpin much of voice technology.
“There are a lot of businesses around voice AI now, but developing very strong models for transcription, synthesis, the technological layer of AI, is very difficult,” Zeghidour said. “Only a few people in the world know how to do it properly. In our case, we have invented most of the technological steps and algorithms that are powering current technology.”
PYMNTS reported in February that voice technology is becoming the foundational infrastructure for agentic commerce and that recent fundraising for voice technology firms and moves by tech giants point to an expanding role for voice in the digital economy.
