Deepgram acquires Pipecat-maker Daily to bolster its voice AI infrastructure

Deepgram announced on Thursday that it is acquiring Daily, the company behind the popular open-source voice AI framework Pipecat. The deal amount was not disclosed, but both companies committed to keeping Pipecat open-source forever. Pipecat manages voice and video streams along with speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech while reducing latency. Daily has raised over $62 million to date, and Deepgram recently reached unicorn status with a $130 million Series C round; both companies were in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016. Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer said he favored Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson's commitment to open-source and vendor-neutrality, and that the engineering cultures matched. Stephenson said the acquisition lets developers build expressive voice agents by plugging in different models and a context bus, and also allows Deepgram to explore real-time communication beyond voice. Deepgram is also launching the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team for voice agents. The voice AI sector has seen significant investment, with model makers like ElevenLabs and infrastructure companies like LiveKit raising substantial funding.

(Source：TechCrunch)