Neil Zeghidour

Neil Zeghidour is the CEO of Gradium, a Paris-based voice AI startup he co-founded in September 2025. Gradium builds real-time, ultra-low-latency voice models for developers and raised one of the largest seed rounds in European AI history at $70M. Before Gradium, Neil co-founded Kyutai in 2023, a non-profit AI research lab backed by €300M from Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, and Eric Schmidt. At Kyutai, he led the development of open-source voice AI models including Moshi, a full-duplex spoken dialogue system, and Hibiki, a real-time speech-to-speech translation model. Previously, Neil was a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where he started and led the generative audio team.