Deepgram acquires Daily to expand voice AI infrastructure

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Deepgram acquires Daily for voice AI

Highlights

Deepgram acquires Daily, adding the widely used open-source Pipecat framework for managing real-time voice and video streams, with financial terms undisclosed.
Deepgram, now a unicorn after a $130 million Series C, gains Daily’s infrastructure and investor-backed expertise, including over $62 million raised by Daily.
Deepgram launches Real-Time Context Standard (RCS) protocol with Pipecat, aiming to enhance expressive, metadata-rich AI voice agents amid growing sector investment.

Deal adds open-source infrastructure

As reported by TechCrunch, Deepgram said on Thursday that it is acquiring Daily, whose Pipecat framework is widely used to manage real-time voice and video streams alongside speech-to-text, large language models and text-to-speech systems. The companies do not disclose the financial terms of the transaction, but say Pipecat will remain open source.

Daily also provides hosted infrastructure for voice and video calls, and the acquisition is likely to give Deepgram broader insight into the real-time communications layer that supports voice AI applications. Earlier this year, Deepgram reached unicorn status after a $130 million Series C round, while PitchBook data shows Daily has raised more than $62 million from investors including Tiger Global, Highfield Capital, Nat Friedman, Lachy Groom and Kevin Weil.

Kwindla Kramer, Daily's co-founder, says the company began experimenting with AI-to-human voice and text communication around the time GPT-4 was released, work that ultimately led to Pipecat. He says Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson's commitment to keeping the framework open-source and vendor-neutral, along with a shared engineering culture, helped drive the deal.

Stephenson says Deepgram has wanted to play a larger role in open source and sees orchestration for AI agents as a key area. He says the acquisition should help developers build more expressive end-to-end speech systems by connecting different models and a context bus across the stack.

Broader push in voice AI market

For Deepgram, the transaction also opens opportunities beyond voice because Pipecat is built for real-time communication across multiple formats. Kramer says Daily did not view Pipecat simply as a voice toolkit, but as infrastructure for a new class of AI-native software designed around real-time interaction.

Deepgram is also launching Real-Time Context Standard, or RCS, an open protocol for voice agents that it co-develops with the Pipecat team. The protocol is designed to define metadata from audio inputs, including signals such as whispers, instructions for language models on how to use those signals, and guidance on how responses should sound.

The move comes as investment continues to flow into both voice AI models and supporting infrastructure. Companies such as ElevenLabs, Gradium and Fish Audio have raised millions of dollars, while infrastructure players including LiveKit and Vapi have also secured multi-million-dollar funding rounds this year.

In our earlier article on the mounting strain on U.S. AI data center expansion, we discussed how rising financing costs, construction delays, and power-grid constraints are making many large projects less credible. We noted that weakening investor confidence and cost overruns are forcing developers to prove they can deliver real, scalable compute capacity on time and within budget.

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