Deepgram announced on Thursday that it is acquiring Daily, the creator of the popular open source voice AI infrastructure Pipecat, to strengthen its real-time voice and video capabilities. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the companies confirmed that Pipecat will remain open source and vendor-neutral. Daily has raised over $62 million in funding to date, while Deepgram reached unicorn status earlier this year following a $130 million Series C round, with both companies sharing roots in the 2016 Y Combinator batch.
Pipecat serves as a framework that manages voice and video streams while reducing latency across speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech systems. Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer noted that the acquisition preserves Pipecat's open-source status under Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson while aligning the engineering cultures of both organizations. Alongside the acquisition, Deepgram is launching the Real-Time Context Standard, an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team to define metadata and contextual signals for voice agents.
This strategic acquisition allows Deepgram to expand its real-time infrastructure and orchestration frameworks, enabling developers to build flexible voice agents using diverse models and tools. The deal reflects ongoing consolidation and high investment within the voice artificial intelligence sector, as infrastructure providers and model makers alike work to capture growing enterprise demand. This acquisition matters because it consolidates key open-source voice AI infrastructure under a major industry player while keeping essential developer frameworks accessible and vendor-neutral.