Paris-based Gladia, an AI transcription and audio intelligence provider, landed $16M in Series A to transition from a speech-to-text API provider to a comprehensive audio infrastructure powerhouse.
Led by XAnge, the funding round saw participation from a range of investors, including Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital. This latest infusion brings Gladia’s total funding to $20.3 million, building on earlier seed investments from New Wave, Sequoia Capital, Cocoa, and GFC.
It all started with the speech-to-text feature
Founded in 2022 by Jean-Louis Queguiner and Jonathan Soto, ex-MIT, Gladia has quickly established itself as a leader in AI transcription and audio intelligence. The company’s API currently supports advanced speech recognition in over 100 languages, offering exceptional accuracy in both asynchronous and real-time transcription.
“Language detection in ASR is an extremely complex task. Each speaker has a unique vocal signature, which we call features. By analysing the vocal spectrum, machine learning algorithms can perform classifications, using the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) to extract the main frequency characteristics,” noted Jean-Louis Queguine, Co-founder and CEO of Gladia, in a conversation with TFN.
Since launching its first asynchronous transcription API in June 2023, Gladia has seen rapid adoption. The company now boasts over 600 customers worldwide, including notable names like Attention, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO, serving over 70,000 users.
Now, Gladia is setting its sights on a broader horizon. “Our ultimate goal is to provide an end-to-end audio AI infrastructure to voice-first platforms across industries,” explains Queguiner. This ambitious vision includes developing à la carte models that can be seamlessly integrated into various tech stacks, powering cutting-edge features for users worldwide.
Tackling industry challenges
Building an accurate, low-latency, and multilingual engine in-house is a complex and resource-intensive task. It requires extensive expertise in language understanding, real-time data handling, and continuous optimisation and maintenance. Real-time models require more computing power and may struggle to produce accurate output immediately due to limited context.
Gladia’s new product allows companies to bypass these challenges. The real-time speech-to-text engine boasts an industry-leading latency of under 300 milliseconds without compromising accuracy, regardless of the language, geography, or tech stack used.
Speaking to TFN, Quéguiner elaborated further: “Our new real-time engine (Gladia Real Time) achieves an industry-leading 300 ms latency. In addition to that, it’s able to extract insights from a call or meeting with the so-called “audio intelligence add-ons”, like NER or sentiment analysis.”
Jonathan Soto, Co-Founder and CTO, highlights the practical benefits: “Our single API is compatible with all existing tech stacks and protocols, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch, and Asterisk. This allows us to integrate real-time transcription and analysis into our customers’ AI platforms.”
The future of audio AI adoption
As Gladia continues to push the boundaries of what’s possible in audio AI, its impact is set to ripple across industries. Gladia’s technology promises to transform how businesses interact with and leverage audio data, from sales enablement to customer support.
“Gladia’s technology allows companies in vertical markets that need cutting-edge real-time transcription, including sales enablement and contact centre platform, to shift seamlessly from manual post-call processing to proactive, low-latency workflows. 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,” Quéguiner explained.
Gladia’s ambitious vision and cutting-edge solutions position it at the forefront of the audio AI revolution in a world increasingly driven by voice-first technologies. As the company embarks on this next chapter, the tech world will be watching closely to see how Gladia reshapes the landscape of audio intelligence.
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