Gradium, a startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai (backed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel), launched out of stealth on Tuesday with a $70 million seed round from a who’s who of investors.

The round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo, with participation from Niel, DST Global Partners, billionaire Eric Schmidt and other investors.

Gradium has developed audio language AI models designed to deliver voice at scale with ultra-low latency — essentially, AI voices that respond almost instantly. It was founded just a few months ago, in September, 2025, by Kyutai founding member Neil Zeghidour, who cut his teeth working with voice models as a researcher at Google DeepMind.

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