Eric Schmidt Invested $70 Million in Paris-Based Voice AI Startup
Gradium, a company developing AI voice models, launched in Paris and raised $70 million. Investors include Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel; the round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo. The founders are engineers from Google, Meta and Jane Street.
By Tetiana Suchkova-Ladik
December 2, 2025 · 1 min read
Investment and investors
A Paris-based startup, Gradium, developing voice artificial intelligence models has raised $70 million in investment. Among its key backers are former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and French billionaire Xavier Niel, founder of Iliad.
The funding round was led by FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo; DST Global, Amplify Partners and entrepreneur Rodolphe Saadé also joined as investors.
Technology, product and facts
The company was founded by engineers who previously worked at Google, Meta and Jane Street. Gradium develops tools for speech synthesis, voice timbre alteration, transcription and speech recognition. Their solutions build on work from the Kyutai lab, notably the Moshi model, which processes audio signals without intermediate conversion to text.
Gradium officially launched in September 2025; the company currently has eight employees. The first voice product supports five languages: English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese. The startup is already working with clients in education, healthcare, gaming and the service sector, but does not disclose their names due to contract terms.
Separately, it was reported that another project including former employees of OpenAI and Meta will be led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In 2022 Eric Schmidt met with Andriy Yermak and Oleksii Reznikov in Kyiv, and in 2023 he purchased a yacht that a Russian oligarch had left in the Caribbean.
