Main image: Gladia Team
French startup Gladia has announced that it has raised €16 million in a Series A funding round, with Ukrainian venture fund Roosh Ventures among the investors. The round was led by XAnge, and included participation from Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, and Soma Capital.
Founded in 2022, Gladia has raised a total of $20.3 million in investments.
The company launched its first API for asynchronous transcription and audio analytics in June 2023, based on its proprietary version of Whisper ASR. It quickly gained popularity among corporate clients, particularly for products like meeting recorders and note-taking assistants. Currently, the API is used by over 600 clients worldwide, including Attention, Calendly, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO, with more than 70,000 users.
The company plans to use the investments to develop a comprehensive audio infrastructure for call centers and AI assistants, starting with a new multilingual real-time transcription and audio analysis tool.
As most speech recognition models today are primarily trained on English audio data, there is an inherent bias. Gladia aims to create the first real-time product that is multilingual. The new, enhanced tool provides transcription for more than 100 languages, as well as improved accent support and the ability to adapt to different languages on the fly.
In the future, the company plans to invest the raised funds in its own R&D and will soon introduce a universal set of AI tools for audio processing, preparing for international expansion. Additionally, the company will expand its product range with additional models, including LLM and RAG.
“The Gladia platform is becoming an essential tool for companies operating in global markets, where linguistic diversity not only presents challenges but also opens opportunities for enhanced communication efficiency. We are proud to support the startup in scaling this technology,” said Serhiy Tokaryev, partner and co-founder of Roosh Ventures.
The new Gladia tool is noted for its ability to capture the mood of the conversation partner during calls, summarize conversations— all in real-time. Moreover, Gladia requires less than one second for transcription and generating insights and summaries of calls or meetings.
“In a time when AI is all the rage, the fundamental qualities of the team serve as a real filter for us. After learning about their experience in cloud technologies and AI, we had no doubts about the investment. We see enormous potential in the field of voice AI and expect rapid growth in applications based on this technology in the coming years. Gladia has every chance to become a key player in this market,” commented Andriy Tymovsky, principal at Roosh Ventures.
