French startup Gladia has raised $16 million in Series A funding to enhance its speech-recognition API, which converts audio files into text with improved accuracy and speed. Competing against giants like Amazon and Google, Gladia aims to integrate audio intelligence with language model tasks in a single API call. The company addresses latency issues, achieving real-time transcription with under 300 milliseconds delay. Gladia's service supports 100 languages and is utilized by over 600 companies, highlighting its growing relevance in the audio application landscape.