The voice AI land grab continues. Deepgram announced Thursday that it is acquiring Daily, the maker and maintainer of Pipecat — one of the most popular open-source voice AI infrastructures. The deal amount was not disclosed, but both companies confirmed Pipecat will stay open-source.
Deepgram (Credits: TechCrunch)
Why Deepgram Wants Daily’s Pipecat Framework
Pipecat is an orchestration framework that manages voice and video streams alongside the pieces of the AI pipeline: speech-to-text, large language models and text-to-speech — all while keeping latency low. Daily, which provides hosted infrastructure for voice and video calls, built Pipecat after co-founder Kwindla Kramer started experimenting with AI-to-human communication around the time GPT-4 launched.
For Deepgram, which hit unicorn status earlier this year with a $130 million Series C, the acquisition adds deep real-time voice and video infrastructure expertise. Notably, both companies were in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016.
Daily Stays Open-Source Under Deepgram
Kramer said there was plenty of acquisition interest, but he favored Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson’s commitment to keeping Pipecat open-source and vendor-neutral forever. “If you sit in the middle of an ecosystem that’s growing very fast… everything being as open as possible is like a commercial advantage,” Kramer told TechCrunch.
Daily had raised over $62 million from investors including Tiger Global, Nat Friedman and Kevin Weil. The deal cements voice AI as one of tech’s hottest consolidation battlegrounds, with top players racing to own the infrastructure behind the next generation of voice agents.
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Source: TechCrunch — read the full story there.
