Deepgram acquires Daily, maker of Pipecat, to bolster voice AI infrastructure

Deepgram said on Thursday that it is acquiring Daily, the maker and maintainer of Pipecat, one of the most popular open source voice AI infrastructures. The companies did not disclose the deal amount, but said they will keep Pipecat open source. Deepgram said the acquisition is intended to bolster its voice AI infrastructure.

Pipecat and Daily's infrastructure

Pipecat is a framework that manages voice and video streams along with other pieces in the pipeline, such as speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech models, while reducing latency. Daily provides hosted infrastructure for voice and video calls of any kind. With Pipecat, Deepgram will likely gain a deeper understanding of real-time voice and video infrastructure.

Daily has raised over $62 million in funding to date from investors including Tiger Global, Highfield Capital, Nat Friedman, Lachy Groom, and Kevin Weil, according to PitchBook data. Earlier this year, Deepgram reached unicorn status with a $130 million Series C round. Both companies were in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016.

Open source and product plans

Kwindla Kramer, Daily's co-founder, said the company started experimenting with AI-to-human communication over voice and text around the time GPT-4 came out, which eventually resulted in the Pipecat framework. He said there had been acquisition interest, but he favored Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson's commitment to keeping Pipecat open source forever, along with matching engineering cultures that give Daily's team freedom to work on different parts of the stack within a bigger organization.

Kramer said Scott was committed to Pipecat being open source and vendor-neutral forever, and that an open ecosystem can be a commercial advantage when a company sits in the middle of a fast-growing ecosystem. Stephenson said Deepgram had wanted to work in open source for a long time and saw an orchestration framework for agents as a potential area. He said Deepgram wants the ecosystem open so everybody can build voice agents, even if they use different models, and that the company wants to become better in areas where it has ground to catch up.

Stephenson said the acquisition lets developers build agents with expressivity and end-to-end speech systems by plugging in different models and a context bus that connects all parts. For Deepgram, the deal also lets it explore areas beyond voice through Pipecat, because the framework caters to real-time communication in different formats. Kramer said the team never thought of Pipecat as a voice toolkit, but as the toolkit needed to build a new kind of AI-native software, and that real-time was always assumed because of where the company came from.

Real-Time Context Standard and market context

Deepgram is also launching Real-Time Context Standard, an open protocol for voice agents that it co-developed with the Pipecat team. The protocol defines metadata such as context from the audio, like a whisper, instructions for a language model on how it can use those signals, and guidance on how the response should sound.

Voice AI has seen a lot of investment from both model and infrastructure sides. Model makers such as ElevenLabs, Gradium, and Fish Audio have raised millions of dollars. Infrastructure companies such as LiveKit and Vapi have raised multimillion-dollar funding rounds this year.

Sources: TechCrunch