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AI transcription start-up, Gladia, has announced that it has raised USD 16m in a Series A funding round. The Paris-based company was founded in 2022 with the mission to deliver real-time speech-to-text solutions that are fast, accurate, and affordable — a feat that Gladia described as challenging for the industry.
The funding round, which closed in April, was led by XAnge, with participation by eight other investors: Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures, and Soma Capital.
Sequoia Capital — a seed investor to both Lilt and Captions — participated in Gladia’s seed funding, together with New Wave, Cocoa, and GFC. To date, Gladia has raised a total of USD 20.3m.
“I founded Gladia for a very personal reason – I was frustrated that existing audio transcription services were not able to understand my French accent,” explained Jean-Louis Quéguiner, CEO and Co-Founder of Gladia.
“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,” he added.
“Language detection in ASR is an extremely complex task. Each speaker has a unique vocal signature.” — Jean-Louis Quéguiner, CEO and Co-Founder, Gladia
Joshua Olusanya, Venture Capital Investor of Illuminate Financial, explained that “automatic speech recognition solutions from big tech (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft), as well as independent vendors, have seen widespread adoption due to their reliability in non-specific speech-related tasks. […] However, their limitations become evident in more specialized settings.”
Olusanya described OpenAI’s Whisper as a “step up from incumbents, but still falls short”, as he explained “domain-specific terminology and contextual nuances are critical,” where customization requires “significant engineering resources, further diminishing its practicality for businesses that require streamlined, cost-effective audio intelligence solutions.”
On the topic of investment, Quéguiner told Slator, “We plan to allocate the newly raised capital towards a comprehensive strategy aimed at accelerating growth and strengthening our market position. We will prioritize investment in infrastructure to support scaling, introduce new features, and develop advanced speech-to-text and GenAI models.”
“A key focus will be expanding our team to fuel innovation and execution, while initiating international growth, starting with a strong push into the US market. These efforts will enhance our product’s capabilities, increase global visibility, and further consolidate our position as a leader in the speech recognition industry,” he concluded.
Real-Time Transcription in 100+ Languages
In parallel to Gladia’s funding round, the Paris-based start-up also announced the release of Gladia Real-Time — a tool that generates both transcripts and insights from calls or meetings across 100+ languages, with a latency of <300 ms.
In addition to live transcription, the product includes real-time add-ons, such as sentiment analysis, NER, and summarization.
Slator Pro Guide: Audiovisual Translation
The Slator Pro Guide: Audiovisual Translation is a concise guide to audiovisual translation, including dubbing, subtitling, access services, AI dubbing, AI captions, and more.
Quéguiner told Slator, “Language detection in ASR is an extremely complex task. Each speaker has a unique vocal signature. We’ve developed a hybrid approach that combines psycho-acoustic features with content understanding for dynamic language detection.”
“Our system, fine-tuned on diverse multilingual audio, doesn’t just listen to how you speak but also understands what you’re saying based on the overall context. This dual approach allows for efficient code-switching and doesn’t let strong accents fall through the cracks,” he said.
According to Quéguiner, clients include note-taking app Coconote, which selected Gladia over another competitor “in order to achieve better accuracy in key languages.” The company is one of 600+ enterprise clients using Gladia’s technology.
Gladia’s first API was launched last summer and has since been used by over 70,000 users worldwide in compliance, sales enablement, and customer service.
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