Voice AI firm Deepgram announced on Thursday that it is buying Daily, the developer of the popular open-source voice AI infrastructure known as Pipecat, as companies in the sector seek consolidation through partnerships and acquisitions.
The financial terms of the transaction were not revealed, but both enterprises confirmed that Pipecat will remain open-source.
Pipecat functions as a framework that handles audio and video streams along with pipeline components such as speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech models while cutting down on latency. Daily offers hosted infrastructure for all types of voice and video calls.
Acquiring Pipecat helps Deepgram build stronger expertise in real-time voice and video infrastructure.
According to PitchBook figures, Daily secured over $62 million in funding from backers including Tiger Global, Highfield Capital, Nat Friedman, Lachy Groom, and Kevin Weil. Deepgram attained unicorn valuation earlier in the year following a $130 million Series C funding round. Both businesses participated in the same 2016 Y Combinator cohort.
Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer explained that the firm began testing AI-to-human communication via voice and text around the release of GPT-4, which led to the creation of Pipecat. He stated that despite receiving multiple acquisition offers, he chose Deepgram because CEO Scott Stephenson promised to keep Pipecat open-source permanently, and the engineering teams shared compatible cultures that allow Daily staff to operate across various layers of the stack inside a larger company.
"Scott was super committed to Pipecat being open-source and vendor-neutral forever. I think there is both a personal commitment and commercial driver there. If you sit in the middle of an ecosystem that's growing very fast, and have many parts of that ecosystem that are genuinely the best from your company, then everything being as open as possible is like a commercial advantage," Kramer said.
Stephenson mentioned that Deepgram wanted to engage with open source for an extended period, and recognized that an orchestration framework for agents presented a strong opportunity, prompting the partnership with Daily.
"We want to open up the ecosystem so everybody can build voice agents. It's great if you're using Deepgram models, but I want you to be using the best models for your use case. And if Deepgram notices that we have some ground to catch up on in a certain area for our own models and products, that's great. We want you to use partners, and then we'll also work on becoming better in those areas," he said.
Stephenson noted that the purchase enables developers to construct agents featuring expressivity and end-to-end speech systems by integrating various models and a context bus that links all components together.
The agreement also permits Deepgram to investigate capabilities beyond voice through Pipecat, as the framework supports real-time communication across multiple formats.
"We never thought about Pipecat as a voice toolkit. We thought about it as the toolkit we needed to build this new kind of AI-native software. Because of where we came from, we just always assumed real-time," Kramer said.
In addition, Deepgram is rolling out the Real-Time Context Standard, an open protocol for voice agents created jointly with the Pipecat team. The protocol establishes metadata such as audio context, instructions for language models on using those signals, and directions for how the reply should sound.
The voice AI market has attracted substantial investments across both model development and infrastructure. Model creators such as ElevenLabs, Gradium, and Fish Audio secured millions in funding, while infrastructure providers like LiveKit and Vapi closed multi-million-dollar funding rounds during the year.
