Gradium extends its seed round to $100 million as Nvidia joins

Gradium, the Paris-based voice-AI startup spun out of French research lab Kyutai, said on July 8 that it reopened its seed round to new investors including Nvidia, bringing the round to $100 million.

The extension added roughly $30 million on top of the $70 million Gradium raised out of stealth in December 2025, when backers included FirstMark Capital, Eurazeo, DST Global Partners, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and French billionaire Xavier Niel. Nvidia’s arrival ties the startup to the dominant supplier of AI training chips.

“Voice AI is reaching an inflection point,” co-founder and chief executive Neil Zeghidour said. “Surpassing $100 million in funding and expanding our investors marks an important milestone for Gradium.” Zeghidour previously worked at Google Brain, DeepMind and Meta.

Gradium said it will use the money to open a Bay Area office and that it is already generating revenue from enterprise customers in customer experience, healthcare, media and AI agents. It cited French automaker Renault, whose RMC BFM Drive in-car AI radio product uses Gradium’s technology.

The revenue and customer details come from Gradium and have not been independently verified. Voice AI is a crowded field, with startups and incumbents competing to turn speech models into reliable enterprise products, and a strategic chipmaker on the cap table does not by itself prove product-market fit.