companies

LiveKit

Open-source real-time infrastructure and agent framework for building voice, video, and multimodal AI agents, plus a managed cloud for teams that don't want to self-host.

LiveKit was founded in San Jose, California in 2021 by Russ D'Sa and David Zhao, who wanted to fix what they saw as a broken WebRTC ecosystem: powerful but painfully hard to self-host reliably at scale. They open-sourced the media server core early, and it became a widely-used building block for real-time video and audio products before the current wave of voice AI agents existed. That timing turned out to matter. When developers started building voice agents on top of LLMs, they needed exactly the low-latency, interruption-tolerant audio transport LiveKit had already built, and the company shipped an Agents framework, with Python and Node.js SDKs, specifically for attaching an AI program to a LiveKit room as a participant. The infrastructure reportedly powers ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode alongside thousands of other voice AI products. LiveKit raised a $100 million Series C in January 2026 led by Index Ventures, with Salesforce Ventures joining and existing investors Altimeter Capital, Hanabi Capital, and Redpoint Ventures returning, valuing the company at $1 billion.

Founded

2021

Headquarters

San Jose, United States

Sector

infrastructure