The voice AI industry is booming, and leading companies are working to strengthen their positions as new business models emerge through strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Deepgram is the latest to join this trend, announcing on Thursday that it will acquire Daily, the company behind Pipecat—one of the most widely used open-source voice AI infrastructures. While financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, both companies have committed to keeping Pipecat open-source.

For those unfamiliar, Pipecat is a framework designed to manage voice and video streams alongside other components in the pipeline, including speech-to-text (STT), large language models, and text-to-speech (TTS) models, all while minimizing latency. Daily, Pipecat's creator, provides hosted infrastructure for various types of voice and video calls. Through this acquisition, Deepgram stands to gain deeper insights into real-time voice and video infrastructure.

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Daily has secured over $62 million in funding to date, with backing from investors including Tiger Global, Highfield Capital, Nat Friedman, Lachy Groom, and Kevin Weil, according to PitchBook data. Earlier this year, Deepgram achieved unicorn status following a $130 million Series C round. Notably, both companies were part of the same Y Combinator cohort in 2016.

Kwindla Kramer, Daily's co-founder, explained that around the time GPT-4 was released, the company began exploring AI-to-human communication through voice and text, which ultimately led to the creation of the Pipecat framework. He mentioned that while there had been significant acquisition interest, he was drawn to Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson's dedication to maintaining Pipecat as open-source indefinitely, as well as the strong engineering culture fit between the two organizations—giving Daily's team the opportunity to work across different parts of the stack within 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," Kramer said.

Stephenson noted that Deepgram had long wanted to engage in open-source work and recognized that an orchestration framework for agents could be a valuable area to explore, which motivated 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 explained.

According to Stephenson, the acquisition enables developers to build agents with expressivity and end-to-end speech systems by integrating different models and a context bus that connects all components. For Deepgram, the deal also opens doors to explore areas beyond voice through Pipecat, since the framework supports real-time communication across various 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 stated.

Deepgram is also introducing the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol for voice agents developed jointly with the Pipecat team. This protocol defines metadata such as context from audio (like a whisper), instructions for language models on how to utilize these signals, and guidance on how responses should sound.

The voice AI space has attracted substantial investment from both model developers and infrastructure providers. Model makers such as ElevenLabs, Gradium, and Fish Audio have raised millions in funding, while infrastructure companies like LiveKit and Vapi have secured multi-million-dollar funding rounds this year.