Gladia

Voice AI · Cloud Infrastructure · Enterprise Software

Acquisition

OVH completes ~$31M stock-swap acquisition of France's Gladia

The deal is OVH's second AI-Lab buy, deepening its push to control the full sovereign AI stack in Europe.

• OVH Groupe finalized its acquisition of Paris-based speech-to-text startup Gladia, first announced June 11, 2026, paying entirely in newly issued OVH shares rather than cash.
• Founded in 2022, Gladia runs a single API that transcribes conversations in real time and in batch across more than 100 languages, serving over 300,000 developers and 2,000 enterprise customers.
• The transaction was structured as a contribution in kind: OVH issued 1,807,186 new shares at EUR 15.66 each (roughly $30M), based on OVH's 20-day volume-weighted average price.
• Some issued shares carry warrants tied to Gladia hitting 2026-2027 performance targets; if fully exercised, up to 3,361,404 additional shares could be issued, lifting total dilution to about 3.3%.
• The newly issued shares represent about 1.18% of OVH's post-deal share capital, diluting an existing 1% shareholder to roughly 0.988%.
• This is OVH's second acquisition for its AI Lab, the R&D unit tasked with building sovereign generative, agentic and multimodal AI technology across its own cloud stack.
• By internalizing speech-to-text infrastructure rather than licensing it, OVH is betting European enterprises will pay a premium for voice AI that isn't routed through US cloud providers.