OVH Groupe has completed its acquisition of Paris-based voice artificial intelligence startup Gladia, finalizing a transaction first announced on June 11, 2026. The deal brings Gladia’s speech-to-text technology, audio intelligence platform, and specialist engineering team into the European cloud provider’s expanding artificial intelligence operations. OVH Groupe said the acquisition will strengthen its capabilities in multimodal, agentic, and generative AI while supporting the development of new voice services across OVHcloud and OVHai.
Transaction Structure
The acquisition was completed through a contribution in kind of Gladia shares, with the sellers receiving newly issued OVH Groupe shares in exchange. OVH Groupe issued 1,807,186 new ordinary shares at EUR 15.66 each, including a contribution premium of EUR 14.66 per share, with the pricing based on the volume-weighted average OVH share price over the 20 trading days ending July 10. The newly issued shares represent approximately 1.18% of OVH Groupe’s share capital following completion, while certain shares also carry warrants linked to Gladia’s performance during the 2026 and 2027 financial years.
Gladia’s Voice AI Platform
Founded in Paris in 2022 by Jean-Louis Quéguiner and Jonathan Soto, Gladia develops transcription and audio intelligence infrastructure for developers and enterprise users. Its platform uses a single application programming interface to process live and recorded conversations in more than 100 languages, converting audio into structured information that can be incorporated into business products and workflows. According to OVH Groupe, the startup currently supports more than 300,000 developers and 2,000 enterprise customers, reflecting growing demand for multilingual speech recognition and real-time audio processing.
Integration Across OVHcloud and OVHai
By internalizing Gladia’s speech-to-text technology, OVH Groupe intends to expand the voice AI capabilities available through its cloud and artificial intelligence portfolios. The integration is expected to support new transcription and audio intelligence services that OVHcloud and OVHai customers can incorporate into applications requiring real-time or batch processing of spoken content. Gladia’s engineers will also add specialized voice AI expertise to OVH Groupe’s teams, reducing the company’s dependence on external providers for an increasingly important component of the AI technology stack.
Strengthening Sovereign AI Capabilities
The acquisition forms part of OVH Groupe’s broader effort to control more of the infrastructure and software required to deliver European cloud and artificial intelligence services. The company said Gladia will reinforce its AI Lab, which is focused on developing future generations of sovereign generative, agentic, and multimodal technologies while maintaining greater control over data hosting, computing infrastructure, and underlying technical components. Adding native voice intelligence also extends OVH Groupe’s position beyond computing capacity and model hosting toward integrated AI services that enterprises can deploy within a European cloud environment.
Governance and Shareholder Impact
OVH Groupe appointed Naolys Audit as an independent contribution appraiser to assess both the value of the contributed Gladia shares and the fairness of the consideration issued in return. The appraiser’s reports, dated July 17, 2026, contained no qualifications, while the contributors agreed to lock-up and orderly disposal commitments covering the OVH Groupe shares they received. If all warrants are exercised, up to 3,361,404 additional shares could be issued, producing a theoretical maximum dilution of approximately 3.3% for an existing shareholder.
Completing the Gladia acquisition gives OVH Groupe direct ownership of a multilingual speech-to-text platform with an established developer and enterprise customer base. The transaction also adds technical talent and proprietary voice AI components that can be incorporated into OVHcloud and OVHai as demand grows for real-time, multimodal, and agentic applications. While the commercial impact will depend on how effectively OVH Groupe converts Gladia’s technology into integrated customer offerings, the deal marks a clear expansion of its strategy to build a more complete and sovereign European AI stack.