A Paris startup for artificial voices has raised 100 million dollars (about 92 million euros) in an initial round led by Nvidia - and immediately became one of the loudest European names in the race for AI that speaks.

The company is called Gradium and makes audio models whose main promised advantage is speed - voices that respond almost instantly, without the usual lag that makes every conversation with an AI assistant sound robotic. The startup is a spin-off from the French research center Kyutai, and it's led by Neil Zeghidour, who previously worked at Google Brain, DeepMind and Facebook.

The round is actually a reopening - in December Gradium had already raised 70 million, and it has now added another 30 with Nvidia coming in as the main investor. Among the earlier backers are the French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel and former Google chief Eric Schmidt. The company already has clients, including the French carmaker Renault, and it's also opening an office in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There's a Balkan angle worth noting here too. This is a European startup, financed with European and American money, that looks toward America the moment the investment lands - the same model we keep seeing: the money is raised in Europe, while the brains and the headquarters move across the ocean. When even a well-funded Paris startup feels it has to be „at the heart of the global AI ecosystem“ in California, that says something about where Europe thinks the future is decided.

The competition is fierce - the main rivals are ElevenLabs (valued at 11 billion dollars) and Google's Gemini. With Nvidia behind it, Gradium has deep pockets and real chips, which in this game means a lot. It remains to be seen whether the European voice will manage to stay European, or become yet another name that started in Paris and grew up in Silicon Valley.