OVH Groupe, the Roubaix-based parent of European cloud provider OVHcloud, said on June 11, 2026 that it had entered exclusive negotiations to acquire Gladia, a Paris startup that sells a speech-to-text API. The company said the deal would add to its expertise in multimodal and agentic generative AI.
The acquisition was completed on July 31, 2026. It was structured as a contribution in kind: Gladia's shareholders handed over their shares in exchange for 1,807,186 new OVH Groupe shares, issued at €15.66 each. At that price the new shares were worth about €28.3 million (roughly $32.5 million), equal to about 1.18% of OVH's share capital. Performance-linked warrants tied to Gladia's results for financial years 2026 and 2027 could add further dilution of about 3.3%. OVH did not publish a headline purchase price.
OVHcloud said it would bring Gladia's speech-to-text technology in-house and use it to offer new voice AI services through its OVHcloud and OVHai platforms. The Gladia team was also set to strengthen OVH Groupe's AI Lab, the research unit working on sovereign, European-owned AI.
What Gladia built
Gladia launched in Paris in 2022. Its product is a single API that transcribes both live and recorded speech in more than 100 languages, handling real-time and batch jobs through the same interface. The company positions its service as audio intelligence: turning calls, meetings and other recordings into text and structured data that software can search and act on.
At the time of the announcement OVH said Gladia served more than 300,000 developers and 2,000 enterprise customers. Named customers included the AI video company HeyGen, webinar platform Livestorm, meeting-notes tools Attention, Circleback and Leexi, the payments company Method Financial and the meeting-bot API Recall.ai. Many of these are note-taking and meeting-recording products, a category that relies on fast and accurate transcription.
The founders and the funding
Gladia was founded by Jean-Louis Quéguiner, its chief executive, and Jonathan Soto, its chief technology officer. Before starting the company, Quéguiner was group vice president for data, AI and quantum computing at OVHcloud, which makes the deal a return to his former employer.
In October 2024 Gladia announced a $16 million Series A led by the Franco-German venture firm XAnge. Illuminate Financial, XTX Ventures, Athletico Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Motier Ventures, Roosh Ventures and Soma Capital also took part. Earlier seed funding had come from New Wave, Sequoia Capital through its First Sequoia Arc programme, Cocoa and GFC, bringing total funding to $20.3 million at that point.
At the time of the Series A, Gladia said it had more than 600 customers. By the June 2026 announcement that figure had grown to 2,000 enterprise customers, according to OVH. The company did not report its headcount, and Faraday Partners, an advisory firm that worked with Gladia during its growth, described the sale as a milestone exit for the startup.
Why OVHcloud is buying
OVHcloud sells cloud infrastructure and markets itself to European customers that want their data handled by a European provider. Adding its own speech-to-text engine lets it offer voice AI as a native service rather than relying on third-party models, which fits that sovereignty pitch.
Brokerage TP ICAP, which kept a sell rating on OVH shares, said in a note that OVH was continuing to strengthen its AI strategy by bringing differentiating technology in-house. The note pointed to OVH's earlier purchase of Dragon LLM as part of the same pattern. OVH Groupe shares rose about 3% to €15.50 on June 12, the first trading day after the exclusive negotiations were announced, outpacing a 1.5% gain in the CAC 40.
What happens to customers
OVH said the Gladia technology would sit inside its OVHcloud and OVHai offers, and that the team would join its AI Lab. Neither company said whether Gladia's standalone API, which is used by developers and companies outside the OVH ecosystem, would change its pricing or terms after the deal.
The warrants linked to Gladia's 2026 and 2027 financial years give the sellers a further stake in how the business performs under OVH ownership. How quickly OVH can turn Gladia's API into voice products that set its cloud and AI platforms apart is the main question the deal leaves open.
