Deepgram, which sells speech-to-text and text-to-speech models through its APIs, announced on October 29 that it is acquiring Daily, which makes Pipecat, an open-source framework for building voice agents, and runs a global network for real-time audio and video. Neither company disclosed the price or said when the deal would close.
Deepgram said Pipecat will stay free under its existing BSD license, and that the two companies are setting up an independent Pipecat Foundation. Kwindla Hultman Kramer, Daily's co-founder and CEO, wrote on Daily's blog that the foundation will be run by a steering committee drawn from across the real-time AI industry, “including companies that compete with Deepgram.”
What Deepgram is buying
Daily, founded in 2016, built its business on WebRTC, selling APIs that let developers put video and audio calls inside their own apps. Its network has 75 points of presence, according to the announcement, and its hosted service, Pipecat Cloud, runs Pipecat agents with built-in phone (PSTN and SIP) connections.
Pipecat grew out of experiments with voice agents that Daily began in 2023, and Daily open-sourced it in 2024. A voice agent is software that holds a spoken conversation. Pipecat runs the chain behind one, passing a caller's audio to a speech-to-text model, the transcript to a language model and the reply to a text-to-speech model, and handling interruptions and knowing when a speaker has finished. Daily said Pipecat has more than 200 integrations and almost 400 contributors.
Pipecat is also set to become the base of Deepgram's own products. Daily said Deepgram is adopting it “as the core of the company’s new voice AI products and services,” and Deepgram said Pipecat and Daily will underpin a new Deepgram Voice Agent Platform, which its chief product officer, Ed Anuff, was due to preview at Deepgram's first Speak conference in San Francisco that day. Scott Stephenson, Deepgram's CEO and co-founder, said the deal lets the company work on the whole system:
Acquiring Daily allows us to bring that expertise together to tackle the whole voice system and give developers a faster path from prototype to production.Scott Stephenson, CEO and co-founder of Deepgram
What changes for developers
For Pipecat users, the promises cover the license and who steers the project. Pipecat's license file is the BSD 2-Clause license, which lets anyone use, change and redistribute the code as long as its copyright notice is kept, and it names Daily as the copyright holder. Neither company named the foundation's members or said when it will be set up. On October 29, Pipecat's GitHub repository still described the project as “Maintained by Daily and the community.”
The promise of vendor neutrality matters because Pipecat connects to companies that sell the same kinds of models as Deepgram. Its README lists 24 speech-to-text services, among them AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs, Google, Speechmatics and OpenAI's Whisper, and 32 text-to-speech services, and it supports WebRTC transport from LiveKit and Vonage as well as Daily. The demo Deepgram pointed developers to for its new Real-Time Context Standard, an open protocol it developed with the Pipecat team, pairs Deepgram's Flux speech recognition with ElevenLabs text-to-speech. The standard passes along what text alone drops between models, such as a whisper or an unclear word, and how a reply should sound.
Kramer told TechCrunch that Daily had drawn a lot of acquisition interest, and that Stephenson “was super committed to Pipecat being open-source and vendor-neutral forever.” Kramer also wrote what the deal means for Daily's existing customers:
For Daily’s customers and the Pipecat ecosystem, nothing will change. Deepgram will sell, support, and develop all of Daily’s current products and services.Kwindla Hultman Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Daily, on Daily's blog
Daily's staff will move to Deepgram once the acquisition is done, and Kramer becomes Deepgram's head of open source.
Where the combined company sits
Here is what each company brings to a voice agent, by layer, as they describe their products:
Layer | Products | From |
|---|---|---|
Speech-to-text | Nova-3, Flux | Deepgram |
Text-to-speech | Aura-2, Flux TTS | Deepgram |
Agent API | Voice Agent API | Deepgram |
Orchestration | Pipecat, Pipecat Flows | Daily |
Transport | WebRTC network, telephony | Daily |
Hosting | Pipecat Cloud | Daily |
Source: Deepgram's speech-to-text, text-to-speech and Voice Agent API pages; Daily's announcement and Pipecat Cloud page.
How the two companies got here
The companies go back a decade. Deepgram, founded in 2015, and Daily were both in Y Combinator's Winter 2016 batch, and Deepgram has powered the transcription inside Daily's audio and video APIs since 2019, Kramer wrote.
Deepgram raised a $130 million Series C led by AVP in January, at a $1.3 billion valuation, and in August took an investment of undisclosed size from Singapore's EDBI as an extension of that round. Its own timeline lists a $12 million Series A and a Series B that it completed at $72 million. Alongside the Series C, Deepgram bought OfOne, which makes voice software for restaurants and their drive-thrus.
Daily raised a $15 million Series A led by Lachy Groom in March 2021 and a $40 million Series B led by Renegade Partners that November. Daily said the Series B brought its total to $60 million, although the $22 million total it reported after the Series A plus the $40 million comes to $62 million. TechCrunch, citing PitchBook, put Daily's funding at more than $62 million.
