Deepgram Acquires Daily, Maker of Open Source Voice AI Framework Pipecat

Voice AI company Deepgram is acquiring Daily, the maker of Pipecat, one of the most widely used open source voice AI infrastructure frameworks. Terms were not disclosed, but both companies said Pipecat will remain open source.

Pipecat manages voice and video streams alongside speech-to-text, large language models and text-to-speech while reducing latency, and Daily also offers hosted voice and video call infrastructure. Daily has raised more than $62 million, while Deepgram became a unicorn earlier this year after a $130 million Series C. Both were in the same 2016 Y Combinator batch.

Co-founder Kwindla Kramer said Daily began exploring AI voice and text communication around GPT-4’s release, leading to Pipecat. Despite wider acquisition interest, he chose Deepgram because CEO Scott Stephenson committed to keeping Pipecat open source and vendor-neutral, and their engineering cultures aligned. Kramer said Pipecat was always seen as a toolkit for real-time, AI-native software rather than just voice.

Stephenson said Deepgram wants to open the ecosystem so developers can use the best models for each use case, even beyond Deepgram’s own. The companies also co-developed the Real-Time Context Standard, an open protocol helping voice agents interpret audio signals and shape responses. The deal reflects heavy investment across voice AI models and infrastructure.

Featured image: Credit: Deepgram