Paris-based AI startup Gladia, which provides speech-to-text technology in multiple languages, has raised $16m in equity funding in a Series A led by Franco-German VC XAnge.
Other investors included French family office Motier Ventures, UK-based investors Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures and Roosh Ventures and US VCs Gaingels, Mana Ventures and Soma Capital. Returning investor New Wave also participated.
It last raised a $4m seed round in 2023, which included backing from Sequoia.
What does Gladia do?
Gladia has built a speech-to-text tool that transcribes audio in more than 100 languages. It also uses GenAI models to extract insights from calls, such as key information, caller sentiment or conversation summary.
The company’s cofounder Jean-Louis Quéguigner says Gladia’s tool can understand accents better than the speech-to-text technologies already on the market — such as those offered by some of the biggest players in tech like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, as well as a number of startups like Otter AI.
These tools are trained predominantly with native English audio data, says Quéguigner, which means that they’re less accurate when it comes to transcribing languages other than English and understanding foreign accents.
“My accent in English sucks,” says Quéguigner. “I’m not well recognised when I speak English. The technology thinks it’s French and the note-taker breaks down.
“Today, when you select the voice recognition language, you get a choice of US English, UK English and Australian English. My accent is French English, so which one do I use?”
Gladia’s technology can also switch languages on the fly if speakers are using several in conversation, which Quéguigner says conventional speech-to-text tools can’t do well. He also says his startup’s tool is faster than existing ones.
“Google, Amazon, Microsoft take between 20-45 minutes to transcribe an hour-long call,” he says. “Our first product [which launched in 2023] took 10 seconds.”
Gladia is set to launch the next iteration of its product in the next few days, which Quéguigner says will provide real-time transcription.
Commercial traction
In just over a year since the launch of its first product, Gladia has secured 70k users among 600 enterprise customers, which include AI assistant Sana and podcast platform Ausha.
Quéguigner says that the main use case for the technology is transcription and note-taking during calls. This has proven particularly useful for customer support agents in call centres, which use Gladia to transcribe conversations, but also to get insights into customer sentiment based on tone of voice and language patterns.
Customer feedback shows that the tool can save up to 30% of the time spent on administrative tasks, such as filling up customer relationship management documentation after calls, according to Quéguigner.
Gladia sells the product on a per-audio-hour basis, starting $0.6 per hour. Enterprises can buy customised plans with additional security features and add-ons for extra call analytics.
The company does not share its revenues, but Quéguigner says: “Margins are a priority for us, which is not the case for all AI startups. We are selling with positive margins, and our priority is to improve those margins through time and reach profitability.”
“Especially nowadays, with money being so expensive, we don’t want to find ourselves in 24 months needing funding that is impossible to get, with valuations that are too high and earnings that are too low.”
Quéguigner did not specify when Gladia expects to reach profitability, or what the company valuation is.
What’s next for Gladia?
Since it launched in 2022, Gladia has primarily targeted the European market. With its focus on multilingualism, the company wants to position itself as the provider of choice for speech-to-text technologies in the region.
“We live two hours away from Belgian people who speak Flemish, French and German, or from Switzerland, which has Swiss German, Swiss French and Swiss Italian,” says Quéguigner.
“We’re talking about pain points that American companies can’t fix, because they don’t understand them.”
The startup plans to use its fresh capital to keep improving its tool, with a particular focus on adding AI-powered technologies to enable better analytics and insights about conversations.
Quéguigner says that he also plans to recruit a total of a dozen employees in the next two years, up from the startup’s current headcount of 30. The majority of these will be based in Europe.
“The ability to concentrate talent in different languages in the same time zone is a huge advantage, which we wouldn’t have in the US,” says Quéguigner.
“Plus talent is cheaper in Europe. A very good resource in France will cost between five and ten10 times less than it will in the US.”
That said, Quéguigner says that the startup is now also seeing some traction stateside. “When US companies want to expand to Europe, they’re running into the same problems,” he says. “They’re facing accents, multilingualism, on-the-fly changes of language […] so, we’re the natural partner for them.”
Gladia plans to tap into growth in the US by recruiting up to five people on the ground, who will focus on commercialisation, tech and product.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/gladia-raise-ai-france-news/
