I Thought CEOs Were Useless": The Google Scientist Who Raised $100M for Voice AI | Neil | Gradium

Neil Zeghidour went from AI researcher to Founder & CEO of Gradium, raising $100M to build the model layer for voice AI. In this conversation recorded at HumanX Europe, Neil takes us through his journey from Facebook AI Research and Google Brain to Kyutai and Gradium — and explains how research around SoundStream and AudioLM helped reshape generative audio. We discuss why small teams can outperform Big Tech in voice AI, how four people built Moshi in six months, Gradium's 50ms text-to-speech latency, the origins of modern audio language models, and why real-time translation could be a matter of months rather than years. Neil also talks about making the transition from scientist to CEO after once believing that “CEOs were completely useless” — and how he now applies scientific experimentation to company building and go-to-market. Highlights 00:00 — “CEOs were completely useless” 00:37 — What Gradium is building 01:28 — SoundStream and the origins of neural audio compression 03:22 — Applying the LLM approach to audio 03:47 — “In one week, we invented voice cloning” 04:32 — AudioLM and the early connection to Suno 04:56 — Leaving Google and moving toward real-time AI 05:57 — Moshi and full-duplex conversational AI 06:33 — Facebook AI Research → Google Brain → Kyutai 07:22 — Why Kyutai was created 07:44 — €300M in donations and 1,000 H100 GPUs 08:46 — Why Neil decided to start Gradium 10:26 — Raising $100M and becoming CEO 11:25 — Why startups can beat Big Tech in voice AI 12:23 — Four researchers, six months, first in the world 13:22 — Gradium's strategy: becoming the voice AI model layer 13:52 — 50ms text-to-speech latency 14:01 — Real-time translation: months, not years 14:43 — The most important lesson Neil learned as a researcher 16:06 — Advice for scientists becoming founders 16:13 — Bringing scientific methodology into being a CEO