LiveKit reaches $1 billion valuation as voice AI infrastructure demand surges across industries

Voice AI engine and OpenAI partner LiveKit hits $1B valuation

LiveKit, a developer of infrastructure software for real-time AI voice and video applications, has announced the raise of $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The round, which comes ten months after LiveKit's previous fundraise, was led by Index Ventures with participation of existing investors including Altimeter Capital Management, Hanabi Capital and Redpoint Ventures. LiveKit powers OpenAI's ChatGPT voice mode. The startup's other customers include xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, as well as 911 emergency service operators and mental health providers. The company was founded in 2021 by Russ d'Sa and David Zhao as an open-source software project for building apps that can transmit real-time audio and video without interruptions, in an era when the whole world was meeting on Zoom during the pandemic. Although LiveKit began as a free developer tool, the business took off after the founders realized big companies wanted a managed cloud version and began providing those services to enterprises amid the voice AI boom.

LiveKit, Seller of Voice Tools to OpenAI, Raises $100 Million

The company will use new funding to expand product engineering, as well as sales and marketing, and plans to double its total employees in the next year. LiveKit, a startup that provides software underpinning voice, video and physical AI models including OpenAI's, raised $100 million in a funding round that values the company at $1 billion. The investment was led by Index Ventures, according to a statement, and included Salesforce Ventures, as well as prior investors Altimeter Capital Managment, Hanabi Capital and Redpoint Ventures. LiveKit's software also lets customers build AI agents and run them on its network. LiveKit's software and network run AI models that use voice, video and so-called physical AI for tasks like robotics. Customers include OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce Inc., Tesla Inc. and Spotify Technology SA, as well as 911 emergency services and AI applications for mental health, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Russ d'Sa said in an interview. D'Sa co-founded the company with David Zhao in 2021 after watching video platforms like Zoom take off during the pandemic. Those apps were built for streaming large amounts of audio and video but the internet itself wasn't built for that. After an initial project failed to take off, friends asked d'Sa to put some of the related infrastructure software and tools in a public GitHub repository so they could use it. That caught on and larger companies like Spotify and Oracle Corp. soon were playing around with it. Some of them said, "We love what you've done in open source -- but can you build a cloud version, a global network, and we can just pay you to operate that?" d'Sa said. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Get the Tech Newsletter bundle. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg's subscriber-only tech newsletters, and full access to all the articles they feature. Bloomberg may send me offers and promotions. Plus Signed UpPlus Sign UpPlus Sign Up By submitting my information, I agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. The technology also turned out to be perfect for the newly developed AI models. In 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, and d'Sa built a demo pairing his technology with the chatbot in order to make queries using speech rather than text. Unbeknownst to d'Sa, someone at OpenAI saw the demo and signed up for LiveKit using a personal Gmail account. The AI research lab ended up striking a commercial deal with LiveKit and using the product for ChatGPT voice mode, he said. LiveKit, based in San Jose, California, provides network infrastructure, hosted on public cloud providers, to provide services like streaming audio back and forth. It also coordinates different models and detects when a user is interrupting the model to speak, helping the software to know when to talk and when to listen, as well as balancing traffic loads and spikes. "There's a whole different style of infrastructure requirements to be able to power those applications," said Sahir Azam, a partner at Index. "If you're calling a voice agent at your bank or your health-care provider in the future, if it's not a very natural experience that feels low-latency and human-like you're instantly not going to engage in it." The company will use new funding to expand product engineering, as well as sales and marketing. LiveKit has 100 employees in total and will probably double in the next year. The company also wants to expand its focus on uses for robotics. Increasingly, d'Sa expects LiveKit may face competition from some of its customers, including OpenAI. The company has a group of prominent angel investors that include Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, venture investor Elad Gil and the CEOs of Perplexity AI, Replit Inc., Vercel Inc. and ElevenLabs.

LiveKit raises $100M at $1B valuation to scale real-time AI and media platform

LiveKit raises $100M at $1B valuation to scale real-time AI and media platform Communications, real-time media and artificial intelligence infrastructure company LiveKit Inc. revealed today that it has raised $100 million in new funding on a $1 billion valuation. The funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of its real-time voice, video and AI developer platform by building out new compute, storage and network services and to scale up its infrastructure for voice-driven and computer vision-driven applications. Founded in 2021, LiveKit began as an open-source project to make building real-time audio and video applications significantly easier for developers, with the company formed to commercialize the technology through a managed cloud platform and enterprise-grade services. LiveKit offers a real-time media server and WebRTC-based framework that routes audio, video and data between participants with ultra-low latency. LiveKit's infrastructure includes a Selective Forwarding Unit, which efficiently passes media streams among users without unnecessary decoding or re-encoding so it can keep latency and bandwidth usage down. The company also provides client software development kits and application programming interface for building interactive apps across platforms, from web browsers to mobile and cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and Unity. The SDKs are designed to make it easy to integrate real-time audio and video features into applications such as video conferencing, live streaming and collaborative tools, without the need to build the underlying media stack from scratch. Other services offered by LiveKit include AI-integrated real-time experiences, such as voice-enabled agents and multimodal applications. With LiveKit's Agent Framework, developers can attach Python or Node.js programs to LiveKit rooms as participants to enable interactive AI behaviors like voice assistants that process speech and respond in real time. LiveKit's platform is used by thousands of developers and teams across industries, including powering ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode to enable low-latency streaming and robotics applications. Other LiveKit customers include xAI Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Spotify Technology SA. Index Ventures Management led the Series C round, with Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Altimeter Capital Management LP and Redpoint Ventures LP also participating. "What stands out most to us is the team's developer-first ethos. LiveKit doesn't just make real-time AI possible; it makes it accessible, composable and scalable for teams of all sizes," Salesforce Ventures said in a welcome post. Prior to the new funding, LiveKit had raised $83 million over three rounds, according to data from Tracxn, taking the total now raised by the company to $183 million.

LiveKit Raises $100 Million for Voice AI Developer Platform | PYMNTS.com

The round values the company at $1 billion, LiveKit co-founder and CEO Russ d'Sa said in a Thursday (Jan. 22) blog post. It followed an April Series B funding round in which LiveKit raised $45 million. Over 200,000 developers and teams use the LiveKit platform to build AI that can interact with the world in real time, according to the company's website. The users include AI and robotics labs as well as Fortune 500 companies. LiveKit helped OpenAI develop ChatGPT Voice Mode, according to the blog post that announced the April funding round. Since the launch of that product, voice AI has been deployed in thousands of applications across financial services, healthcare, retail, customer support, education and robotics. In these applications, voice agents help process claims, tutor students, triage patients, support customers and interview candidates, according to the Thursday blog post. "Today, large enterprises are evaluating and building voice agents to automate workflows, improve customer experiences and unlock new revenue," d'Sa said in the post. "While many of these use cases are still in the proof-of-concept stage, some are moving into production and operating at real scale. Agentforce voice agents run customer support for the world's top brands, and Tesla uses voice AI for sales, support, insurance and roadside assistance." "We anticipate 2026 will be the year voice AI will be broadly deployed across thousands of use cases around the world," d'Sa said in the post. Sahir Azam, an early-stage and growth investor at Index Ventures, which led the Series C funding round, said in a separate Thursday blog post that his company believes that LiveKit is establishing "one of the most important infrastructure layers in the AI stack." "In the near term, voice agents are becoming the first line of interaction in call centers and customer workflows," Azam said in the post. "As robotics and autonomy take off, the same underlying requirements will apply to systems interacting with the physical world through cameras, microphones and sensors." For all PYMNTS AI and digital transformation coverage, subscribe to the daily AI and Digital Transformation Newsletters.