Deepgram Is Buying Daily, Maker of the Pipecat Voice-Agent Framework, and Says Pipecat Will Stay Open
Speech-model company Deepgram said on Oct. 29 that it is acquiring Daily, the real-time infrastructure company behind the open-source Pipecat voice-agent framework. Pipecat stays under its BSD licence and moves to an independent Pipecat Foundation, Deepgram says, and Daily's team joins Deepgram. Terms were not disclosed. Deepgram also introduced an open Real-Time Context Standard and previewed a Voice Agent Platform built on Pipecat.
Deepgram is buying the open-source layer that many voice-agent builders use to wire together other companies' models, and its promise to keep that layer neutral is now the thing to watch. Deepgram said on October 29 that it is acquiring Daily, the company behind Pipecat, which Deepgram calls the world's most popular open-source voice-agent framework. Terms were not disclosed, TechCrunch reports.
The deal#
Pipecat will stay open source and free under its existing BSD V2 licence, Deepgram says, and the companies are setting up an independent Pipecat Foundation with organizations that contribute to and use the framework. Daily's team joins Deepgram, and Daily co-founder Kwindla Hultman Kramer becomes Deepgram's head of open source. "Keeping Pipecat open was fundamental to our decision to join Deepgram," he said in the announcement.
Daily also runs real-time network infrastructure with 75 points of presence, which Deepgram says will underpin its new Voice Agent Platform alongside its own speech models. Chief product officer Ed Anuff was set to preview the platform at Deepgram's Speak event on October 29.
The standard#
Deepgram also introduced the Real-Time Context Standard, an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team. It defines metadata for audio context, such as a whisper or an unclear word, instructions for how a language model should use those signals, and guidance for how a response should sound, with adapters for models from different providers, Deepgram says.
TechCrunch reports that Daily had raised more than $62 million, citing PitchBook, and that Deepgram became a unicorn with a $130 million Series C earlier this year. Both companies went through Y Combinator in 2016, according to TechCrunch.
Pipecat is one of several open routes to building voice agents; Mistral, for example, built its new voice-agent SDK on LiveKit (our report). Vendor neutrality matters to developers who combine speech, language and voice models from different companies, and those developers now depend on a speech-model vendor keeping its word.
Limits#
- Price and terms were not disclosed, and the deal's closing conditions were not described.
- The Pipecat Foundation's governance, membership and funding have not been published.
- "Most popular" is Deepgram's description of Pipecat; Times of AI has not seen comparative usage data.