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, 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.
Kwindla Kramer, Daily’s co-founder, said around the time when GPT-4 came out, the company started experimenting with AI-to-human communication over voice and text, which eventually resulted in the Pipecat framework. He noted that while there has been a lot of acquisition interest, he favored Deepgram’s CEO Scott Stephenson’s commitment to keeping Pipecat open-source forever, and the engineering culture of both organizations matched, giving Daily’s team the freedom to work on different parts of the stack within a bigger organization. I think there is both a personal commitment and commercial driver there.
If you sit in the middle of an ecosystem that’s growing very fast, and have many parts of that ecosystem that are genuinely the best from your company, then everything being as open as possible is like a commercial advantage,” Kramer told TechCrunch. Stephenson said that Deepgram has been wanting to work in open source for a long time, and the company realized that an orchestration framework for agents was a potential area, which drove the decision to partner with Daily. It’s great if you’re using Deepgram models, but I want you to be using the best models for your use case.
And if Deepgram notices that we have some ground to catch up on in a certain area for our own models and products, that’s great. We want you to use partners, and then we’ll also work on becoming better in those areas,” he said. Stephenson said the acquisition lets developers build agents with expressivity and end-to-end speech systems by plugging in different models and a context bus that connects all parts.
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