French AI transcription and audio intelligence provider Gladia has completed a $16 million Series A funding round, as one of the startup's investors, Roosh Ventures, shared with Vestbee. This investment brought the startup's total funding to $20.3 million since its inception in 2022.
- Headquartered in Paris, Gladia was established by Jean-Louis Queguiner and Jonathan Soto with a mission help companies extract insights from audio data. The startup is developing a real-time multilingual speech recognition engine to address the bias in models trained mainly on English. The new engine offers advanced transcription in over 100 languages, better accent support, and seamless language adaptation.
“I founded Gladia for a very personal reason – I was frustrated that existing audio transcription services were not able to understand my French accent,” Jean-Louis Quéguiner, CEO and co-founder of Gladia said. “Our international team and customers often switch between languages during meetings, but finding a transcription solution that can handle different languages and accents simultaneously was impossible.”
- Gladia launched its first asynchronous transcription and audio intelligence API in June 2023. Now, the company serves more than 70,000 users and 600 enterprise clients, including companies like Attention, Ausha, Calendly, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO.
- The Series A funding round was led by XAnge, with participation from Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital.
- Gladia will use the new funding to enhance R&D and launch an AI toolkit for audio, expand its offerings with models like LLMs and RAG, and pilot an agent-assist solution in the CCaaS sector. The company also plans to grow its talent base for international expansion.
