In this edition:

🧠 Gradium, the Paris startup, spun out of research lab Kyutai, just emerged from stealth with a $60M seed round to become the global foundation layer for real-time voice interactions. At an appearance at the aiPulse conference hosted by Scaleway at StationF, CEO Neil Zeghidour explained the technology and the vision driving the company's global ambitions.

🧠 The legendary AI scientist Yann LeCun left Meta to build world models. Hear why he says Silicon Valley is too hypnotized by ChatGPT to see what's coming next.

Chris O'Brien + Helen O'Reilly-Durand

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Headlines

🗞️ Brussels to Google: “About Those AI Overviews… We Need to Talk.” The EU just opened a formal probe into Google’s AI Overviews, suspecting the search giant might be quietly siphoning content from publishers and YouTubers without fair compensation. Media groups say the choice is simple: let Google’s AI munch your articles, or get buried in the search results graveyard – très fair, non? Brussels now wants to know whether Google is abusing its dominant position, especially since YouTube creators don’t even get a “no thanks” button. Google insists the complaint threatens “innovation,” which is Big Tech for “stop touching my data pipeline.” France hasn’t even received AI Overviews yet, and Google may need to rewrite half the playbook before it lands. Bienvenue en Europe. | Les Echos, Le Monde Informatique

🗞️ Le Monde Joins Meta’s AI Buffet – Because “Staying Passive” Is So 2023. French newspaper Le Monde, CNN, Fox News, and a whole geopolitical bingo card of media groups just signed a multi-year deal letting Meta AI slurp their articles in real time. In exchange? Links back to publishers and “significant revenue,” which is polite French for “we finally made Zuck pay for something.” Le Monde says the negotiation was longue, très longue, but better than waiting for lawmakers to figure out what “AI” even stands for. The move adds to a patchwork of deals – OpenAI here, AFP, Mistral there – while half the media world is still suing everyone else into oblivion. France hasn’t settled the war between “coopérer” and “attaquer,” but one thing’s clear: the Great AI Content Gold Rush is officially open for business. | Les Echos

🗞️ AI Boom? Yes. Funding for Women? Non! Sista and BCG just dropped their new barometer, and quelle surprise: the AI gold rush is leaving women even further behind in the French Tech dust. In France, less than 1% of AI funding goes to all-female founding teams, meaning the hottest sector in tech is also the coldest for parity. Teams of women raise 19× less than men in AI, proving that LLMs may hallucinate, but the funding gap is painfully real. The only bright spot? The Sista charter goal (25% women-founded startups in VC portfolios) is nearly met, but in euros, not so much. As SISTA says: Europe wants AI sovereignty yet ignores half its population. | Les Echos

🗞️ AI Jump: Simplon Hops In to Train 10,000 Future GenAI Wizards. France’s Simplon Foundation just pressed GO on AI Jump, a mega-training program to upskill 10,000 job-seekers in generative AI across France, Spain, and Italy. No degrees? No problem. Low resources? Très bien. If you want to learn AI, Simplon will teach you – from CV-writing bots to hackathon heroics. The program targets youth, women, disabled people, precarious workers, and career-changers, because inclusivity isn’t optional in 2025. Companies like Accenture, Salesforce, and Société Générale are pitching in, so it’s not just AI theory – it’s AI with a foot in the job market. Simplon promises >70% positive outcomes: employable humans, not just AI enthusiasts. Voilà, democratizing GenAI the French way. | Le Monde Informatique

🗞️ Open Bee Buzzes Up With AI Agents – Bankruptcy Who...? Despite juggling a judicial recovery, French document-management player Open Bee just scooped up Veectoria, makers of on-the-shelf and custom AI agents. Veectoria’s “Eva” can record a conversation, upload it to a sovereign cloud, and transcribe a full report. It's basically an AI secretary who doesn’t ask for vacation. Open Bee plans to fold this AI magic into its GED offerings, making them smarter, more autonomous, and marginally more frightening to humans. 52 resellers are already on board, proving companies love their processes automated and spiced with AI. Bankruptcy drama aside, Doxsa’s holding now employs 10 Veectoria AI minds. Because nothing says corporate resilience like buying your way into the AI future. Le Monde Informatique

Other Headlines

🗞️ AI Called It… Wrong. Miss Tahiti Wins Miss France 2026. Remember last week when our beloved AI projected the future winner? Yeah… it was confidently wrong. Turns out Miss Tahiti takes the crown, proving that algorithms still can’t capture charisma, poise, or the mysterious human X-factor. Digital trends, predictive models, big data – all rendered useless by a smile and a sparkling tiara. AI may predict clicks, traffic, and maybe even market trends, but apparently not pageant winners. Lesson learned: humans still hold the crown (literally), at least for now. | Entrevue

ICYMI

🗞️ How Cybersecurity Startup MokN Combats Phishing With Deceptive 'Fake Doors' | When stolen credentials breached his 'impenetrable' system, Gautier Bugeon had an insight: give attackers fake doors to try. His startup MokN raised €2.6M, hit $1M ARR in 16 months with half its clients being billion-dollar companies, and is now expanding to America. | The French Tech Journal

🗞️ How Phagos Plans to Kill Superbugs with AI and Nature’s Own Viruses | Antibiotics are failing. French biotech Phagos thinks the answer lies in nature’s own bacteria-killers: 'phages.' With €25 million and an AI platform to match viruses with their prey, the startup could rewrite the rulebook on how we fight infection. | The French Tech Journal

🧠 Gradium Wants To Make Voice The New Operating System for AI

On stage at the aiPulse conference at StationF in Paris last week, Gradium CEO Neil Zeghidour placed a small robot on the floor at the foot of the stage. The Reachy Mini, a compact, expressive machine borrowed from Hugging Face, had been connected to the voice AI API developed by Gradium.

After a quick command from Zeghidour, Reachy blinked to life and began speaking in a warm, natural voice. Over the next few minutes, it transformed from a cheerful assistant into a boisterous gym coach named Logan, then pivoted seamlessly into Quebec-accented French to discuss the philosophy of human-machine communication.

The audience watched as the robot's personality, voice, and language shifted on command, guided by nothing more than conversational prompts, eventually breaking into a little dance upon request.

"This was completely unscripted," Zeghidour said afterward, grinning.

The demonstration was a glimpse of the future that Zeghidour and his co-founders are racing to build. In this world, voice becomes the primary interface between humans and machines, as natural and intuitive as conversation between two people.

Just days earlier, Zeghidour's company had emerged from three months of stealth mode with a €60 million seed round and a roster of backers that spans Silicon Valley royalty, French industrial titans, and some of the world's most respected AI researchers. Gradium's ambitions are as outsized as its funding.

"The potential of voice AI is not realized to even 1% of what it can be," Zeghidour told the audience. "Voice is going to be the way we interact with machines."

🧠 Yann LeCun Bets on Paris, Not Palo Alto, for AI's Next Revolution

When one of the godfathers of deep learning tells a packed audience that Silicon Valley has lost the plot, people tend to listen.

Yann LeCun, who spent over a decade as Meta's Chief AI Scientist, took the stage at aiPulse last week with a message that the large language models everyone is obsessing over are a technological dead end for achieving true machine intelligence.

Perhaps the greater heresy: The revolution that will replace them is going to happen in Europe.

"Silicon Valley is completely hypnotized by generative models," LeCun declared, on stage. "So you have to do this kind of work outside Silicon Valley."

AI Funding News

For the week ending November 28, there were 5 AI startups that raised a total of €75.75 million.

📇 Company: Gradium
🔍 Description: Paris-born voice AI startup spun out of non-profit research lab Kyutai. Gradium develops next-generation “audio language models” enabling real-time, low-latency conversational voice interactions across multiple languages. The company commercializes Kyutai’s cutting-edge research—including the speech-to-speech model Moshi—to power applications ranging from gaming characters to medical transcription and live interpretation.
💻 Website: Gradium
📍 HQ City: Paris (spinout from Kyutai)
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €60M (≈ $70M)
🏦 Investors: FirstMark Capital (lead), Eurazeo (lead), DST Global Partners, Korelya Capital, Amplify Partners, Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Eric Schmidt, Liquid 2 Ventures, Drysdale Ventures, plus participation from tech leaders including Yann LeCun, Olivier Pomel, Ilkka Paananen (Illusian Founder Office), Thomas Wolf, Guillermo Rauch, and Mehdi Ghissassi (Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company)
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Neil Zeghidour, Laurent Mazaré, Alexandre Défossez, Olivier Teboul
🗞️ News: Gradium emerges from stealth with a landmark €60M Seed round—one of Europe’s largest—to commercialize Kyutai’s breakthrough speech-to-speech models and build real-time, multilingual conversational AI. Backed by a rare coalition of global tech figures (Niel, Saadé, Schmidt, LeCun), the startup aims to compete with giants like OpenAI and ElevenLabs by offering low-latency, high-quality voice interaction at scale. Early traction includes a dozen paying customers in gaming, healthcare, and language services, with plans to become the leading real-time voice interface layer for next-generation AI agents. | Sifted, FrenchWeb, Maddyness

📇 Company: 2501.ai
🔍 Description: Developing autonomous AI agents for IT/Cloud infrastructure maintenance, enabling automated detection, diagnosis, remediation of incidents, compliance checks, and security updates. Its sovereign, modular, and secure platform reduces MTTR, lowers operating costs, and increases system availability.
💻 Website: 2501.ai
📍 HQ City: Paris
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €8M
🏦 Investors: Cusp Capital, Axeleo Capital (AXC), Galion.exe
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Alexandre Pereira, Alex Zhuk
🗞️ News: This round comes just two months after a €2M Pre-Seed round. 2501.ai will accelerate recruitment in AI applied to observability, remediation, and real-time event management, while launching commercial operations across Spain, the UK, and Germany. The company positions itself as a sovereign European alternative in IT/Cloud automation for critical infrastructures. | Maddyness, LinkedIn

📇 Company: Basalt
🔍 Description: Collaborative AI engineering platform helping enterprises industrialize and scale AI agents through continuous experimentation, evaluation, and production monitoring. Basalt enables teams to compare prompts and models, validate scenarios with business experts, detect failures in real-world contexts, and prevent regressions through a centralized workflow.
💻 Website: Basalt
📍 HQ City: San Francisco (tech team in Paris)
🧗 Round: Seed (not explicitly stated, formatted as funding round)
💰 Amount Raised: €4.25M (USD $5M)
🏦 Investors: Entourage (lead), Peak Capital (lead), Hexa, Alpha Star, Kima Ventures
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Guillaume Marquis, François de Fitte
🗞️ News: Basalt raises €4.25M to accelerate development of its collaborative AI engineering platform and expand hiring across France and the U.S. The platform addresses the growing gap between rapid AI prototyping and fragile enterprise-scale deployment by enabling structured testing, scenario validation with domain experts, and deep production monitoring of AI agent behavior. | FrenchWeb

📇 Company: ROB’OCC
🔍 Description: French sovereign-robotics startup developing ROC-E, an eco-designed, AI-powered mobile assistant robot designed to automate internal flows, improve working conditions, and boost productivity for companies of all sizes — including TPEs and SMEs.
💻 Website: ROB'OCC
📍 HQ City: Brens
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €3M
🏦 Investors: OCCIBOT Industrie, Tarn Capital Investissement, Franco-Swiss business angels
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Team of eight robotics experts and two industrial partners (including DG Patrick Dehlinger)
🗞️ News: ROB’OCC raises €3M to accelerate commercial deployment of ROC-E, its plug-and-play autonomous indoor robot requiring no Wi-Fi, IT integration, or site adaptation. Built with 84% European components and manufactured in Occitanie, ROC-E is gaining traction through more than 60 successful POCs with customers such as Safran, Orange, BIC, Mecaprec, and Actia. The funding will support hiring (15 new roles), scale-up of production, and expansion into European markets as ROB’OCC positions ROC-E as a leading solution for sovereign, simple, and sustainable robotics. | MtoM

📇 Company: Vulgaroo
🔍 Description: Bordeaux-based deeptech startup developing generative-AI–powered software that automatically produces medical memos and presentation-ready analyses to simplify reporting for pathology and diagnostic laboratories.
💻 Website: Vulgaroo
📍 HQ City: Bordeaux
🧗 Round: Seed
💰 Amount Raised: €500K
🏦 Investors: Angels Santé (lead), health-focused business angels; Bpifrance (support)
👨💼👩💼 Founders: Christophe Lelong, Victor Stanzel
🗞️ News: Vulgaroo raised €500K to launch the commercial rollout of its medical-report automation software and continue technological development. The startup has signed a major distribution agreement with Dedalus, Europe’s leading health and diagnostics software provider, enabling deployment across more than 4,000 pathology and biology labs in France. Vulgaroo plans to hire and relocate to the PariSanté Campus as it scales. | Journal des Enterprises

🗣️ Announcements 🗣️

🗣️ Microsoft GenAI Studio 3rd Edition | Microsoft France announces the opening of applications for the third promotion of its Microsoft GenAI Studio acceleration program, dedicated to supporting French startups in the adoption and development of solutions based on artificial intelligence. | Deadline: December 3 | Apply here

🗣️ Pioneers AI Lab | The AI Lab unites the top 8 AI builders in Europe every 3 months to build global consumer and prosumer products at STATION F, Paris. | More details on the next application batch

📆 Events 📆

📆 apidays Paris | December 9 - 11 | CNIT Forest, Paris | As Europe’s capital of tech, policy, and innovation, Paris provides the perfect setting to explore the convergence of APIs and AI. At the heart of this intersection, apidays Paris sparks essential conversations on data security, digital sovereignty, and sustainable innovation in the age of intelligent systems. | Buy Tickets

📆 VOICE AI Space Paris Conference | December 10 | Voice AI Space Paris Conference is part of the Future of Software Technologies Event, a unique federation of 25+ vendor-neutral tech conferences (Apidays, Generation AI, Green IO, and more), bringing together 6000+ participants and 300+ sessions across 3 days. Your ticket also grants full access to 3 days of conferences. | Tickets

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