French artificial intelligence transcription and audio intelligence startup Gladia SAS announced today that it has raised $16 million in new funding and launched a multilingual real-time audio transcription and analytics engine.

Founded in 2022, Gladia aims to help companies leverage cutting-edge AI and retrieve actionable insights from audio data. The company’s application programming interface supports advanced speech recognition features in more than  100 languages, with exceptional accuracy and asynchronous and real-time transcription.

Gladia’s speech recognition tools seek to tackle the issue wherein most speech recognition models today are trained predominantly on English audio data and, at least according to Gladia, are “inherently biased.” Gladia’s solutions, in contrast, have been built to be truly multilingual, with its new fine-tuned engine debuting today offering advanced real-time transcription in more than 100 languages, along with enhanced support for accents and the ability to adapt to different languages on the fly.

The new engine is able to extract insights from calls, such as the caller’s sentiment, key information and conversation summary, in real time, taking less than a second to generate both transcript and insights from a call or meeting using Gladia.

The new product also overcomes challenges such as language understanding and real-time data handling with continuous optimization and maintenance. The real-time speech-to-text engine has a latency of under 300 milliseconds without compromising accuracy, regardless of the language, geography, or tech stack used.

“Our single API is compatible with all existing tech stacks and protocols, including SIP, VoIP, FreeSwitch and Asterisk,” said co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jonathan Soto. “This allows us to easily integrate real-time transcription and analysis into our customers’ AI platforms so they can focus on delivering the best services to their end users.”

The company’s first async transcription and audio intelligence API launched in June 2023 and has gained traction in the enterprise market, particularly with meeting recorders and note-taking assistants. The API is now used by more than 600 customers around the world, including Attention Inc., Circleback Inc., Method Financial Inc., Recall AI Inc., Sana Labs AB and VEED.IO Ltd.

The $16 million Series A funding round was led by XAnge SAS, with Illuminate Financial Management LLP, XTX Ventures Ltd., Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures SARL, Roosh Ventures GmbH and Soma Capital also participating. The new funding will be used for research and development, to soon bring to market a one-stop AI toolkit for audio and for Gladia to expand its product offering with additional à-la-carte models — including large language models and retrieval-augmented generation.

Image: Gladia