Gradium Extends Funding to $100 Million and Expands to Silicon Valley

Gradium extends its seed funding to $100 million, welcoming new investors including NVIDIA, and opens a San Francisco Bay Area office to scale its real-time voice AI.

How a benchmark change produced a faster TTS model

On June 3, 2026, Gradium's time to first audio on the Coval TTS leaderboard moved from 171.9 ms to 429.6 ms. No model had shipped and no serving infrastructure had changed. What changed was the measurement: Coval had started counting the silence at the start of the stream.