French AI startup Gladia secures $16M series A for real-time audio transcription and analytics

Paris-based AI startup Gladia has secured $16 million in Series A funding to accelerate its shift from a simple speech-to-text API to a full-service audio infrastructure provider. The company, founded in 2022, aims to enhance services for contact centers, sales platforms, and AI meeting assistants.

The funding round was led by XAnge, with backing from Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital. This brings Gladia’s total raised to $20.3 million, with previous seed funding from New Wave, Sequoia Capital, and others.

With the fresh capital, Gladia plans to boost its R&D efforts and soon launch an all-in-one AI toolkit for audio. The company is also expanding its product line with additional models, including large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Currently, the company is piloting an AI-powered agent-assist solution for the contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) market, driven by their real-time AI engine. Gladia is also expanding its team as it gears up for international growth.

Alongside the funding, Gladia introduced the first multilingual real-time audio transcription and analytics engine, designed to provide accurate transcriptions across over 100 languages, with built-in support for various accents.

Founded in 2022 by Jean-Louis Queguiner and Jonathan Soto, Gladia’s mission is to help companies gain valuable insights from audio data. Their API offers advanced speech recognition in multiple languages with both asynchronous and real-time capabilities.

Since launching, Gladia has grown its user base to over 70,000 and now serves 600 enterprise customers, including Attention, Ausha, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO.

“Gladia embodies the kind of innovative AI company we’re proud to support,” said Alexis du Peloux, Partner at XAnge. “Jean-Louis and his team are leading the charge in AI-powered audio solutions, and we’re excited to back them in this next phase of growth.”

Jean-Louis Queguiner, Gladia’s CEO, highlighted the personal motivation behind the company. “I started Gladia because I was frustrated by transcription services that couldn’t understand my French accent,” he explained. “Our team needed a solution that could handle multiple languages and accents, and we couldn’t find one—so we built it.”

Unlike many speech recognition models, which are typically trained on English data and often struggle with other languages, Gladia has focused on creating a truly multilingual, real-time engine. Their new platform can transcribe conversations in over 100 languages while simultaneously recognizing different accents and switching languages mid-conversation.

Gladia’s technology also goes beyond transcription. It can instantly extract key information, assess sentiment, and summarize conversations in real time, all with an industry-leading latency of under 300 milliseconds.

The startup’s API is compatible with various tech stacks, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch, and Asterisk, making integration seamless for companies in need of real-time audio intelligence.

“Our API simplifies things for companies trying to incorporate AI into their existing platforms,” said Jonathan Soto, Gladia’s CTO. “By integrating real-time transcription and analytics, we’re helping businesses focus on what matters: delivering great services to their customers.”

Gladia’s initial transcription API, launched in mid-2023, quickly gained traction in the enterprise space, particularly among meeting recorders and note-taking platforms. Today, it’s used by hundreds of businesses, with over 70,000 users globally.

“Whether it’s automated CRM enrichment or real-time guidance for support agents, Gladia is designed to help businesses operate smarter and more efficiently in record time, without requiring AI expertise in-house,” Queguiner said.

Gladia Founders