Deepgram Acquires Daily, Maker of Open-Source Pipecat
Deepgram has agreed to acquire Daily, which develops the open-source Pipecat framework and provides hosted infrastructure for real-time voice and video calls. Pipecat will remain free and open source under its BSD V2 license, while the companies will establish an independent Pipecat Foundation; the acquisition price was not disclosed.
The deal brings a widely used open-source voice-agent framework and its hosted real-time communications infrastructure under Deepgram while preserving Pipecat’s open-source model.
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 didn’t disclose the deal amount but said that 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, like speech-to-text (STT), large language models (LLMs), 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 over $62 million in funding to date from investors such as 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.