Gladia builds AI transcription and audio-intelligence tools, offering an API with advanced speech recognition in over 100 languages and both asynchronous and real-time transcription. Its real-time speech-to-text engine advertises industry-leading latency under 300 milliseconds without compromising accuracy across languages, geographies, or tech stacks. The company serves over 70,000 users and 600 enterprise customers, including Attention, Ausha, Circleback, Method Financial, Recall, Sana, and VEED.IO. Gladia plans to use the new funding to advance R&D and bring a one-stop AI toolkit for audio to market while expanding its product offering with additional à la carte models, including large language models and retrieval-augmented generation. Founded in 2022 and based in Paris, France, Gladia has raised a total of $20.3M to date following earlier seed investments. Earlier seed backers include New Wave, Sequoia Capital (as part of the First Sequoia Arc program), Cocoa, and GFC. Gladia builds an audio transcription API that converts audio into text in near real time, using OpenAI’s Whisper as a foundation. The company has optimized Whisper for speed and reliability and added pre- and post-processing to reduce hallucinations and improve language detection, speaker diarization, timestamps, punctuation, and casing. Gladia charges about $0.61 to transcribe an hour of audio and says the process takes roughly 60 seconds per hour; outputs are available in JSON as well as SRT and VTT subtitle formats. Customers include call centers, virtual meeting services and video publishers such as Claap, Livestorm and Selectra. The co-founders are Jean-Louis Quéguiner (CEO) and Jonathan Soto. Gladia raised a $4 million seed round led by New Wave with participation from Sequoia, Cocoa and several business angels. The company plans to build higher-level audio intelligence features — translation and multi-language subtitles, summarization, topic categorization, automatic chapters and sentiment analysis — moving beyond transcription into augmented audio data.

Total raised

$20M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Oct 2024