Deepgram acquires Daily, maker of open-source voice AI framework Pipecat

The voice AI sector is hot, and top players are trying to consolidate their position as more business models come to the fore through partnerships and acquisitions. Deepgram is the latest to make such moves: the company said on Thursday that it is acquiring Daily, the maker and maintainer of one of the most popular open-source voice AI infrastructures, Pipecat.

The companies did not disclose the deal amount but said they will keep Pipecat open source.

For the uninitiated, Pipecat is a framework that manages voice and video streams along with other pieces in the pipeline, such as speech-to-text (STT), large language models and text-to-speech (TTS) models, while reducing latency. Its maker, 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 more than $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. Incidentally, both companies were in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016.

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

“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 told TechCrunch.

Stephenson said Deepgram had wanted to work in open source for a long time, and the company realized that an orchestration framework for agents was a potential area, which drove the decision to partner 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 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, as the framework caters to real-time communication in different 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.

Deepgram is also launching the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), 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 on both the 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, meanwhile, have raised multi-million-dollar funding rounds this year.