Deepgram Acquires Daily, the Company Behind Open-Source Voice AI Framework Pipecat
Deepgram says Pipecat will remain open-source and vendor-neutral after acquiring Daily, a choice co-founder Kwindla Kramer said drove the deal. Daily had raised over $62 million, while Deepgram reached unicorn status after a $130 million Series C.
Deepgram announced on October 29, 2026, that it is acquiring Daily, the maker of Pipecat, one of the most widely used open-source voice AI frameworks. The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Pipecat is a framework that manages voice and video streams alongside speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech components, while reducing latency. Daily, Pipecat’s creator and maintainer, also provides hosted infrastructure for voice and video calls. Both Deepgram and Daily were part of the same Y Combinator batch in 2016. Daily has raised over $62 million in funding from investors including Tiger Global, Highfield Capital, Nat Friedman, Lachy Groom, and Kevin Weil. Deepgram reached unicorn status earlier this year with a $130 million Series C round.
Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer said the company began experimenting with AI-to-human voice communication around the time GPT-4 launched, which led to the creation of Pipecat. Kramer said he chose Deepgram over other acquisition interest because of CEO Scott Stephenson’s commitment to keeping Pipecat open-source and because the engineering cultures of both organizations aligned.
“Scott was super committed to Pipecat being open-source and vendor-neutral forever,” Kramer told TechCrunch, adding that operating openly within a fast-growing ecosystem carries a commercial advantage when a company’s own products are competitive within it.
Stephenson said the acquisition supports Deepgram’s goal of enabling developers to build voice agents using the best available models, including those from other vendors, while Deepgram continues improving its own offerings.
Alongside the acquisition, Deepgram is launching the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol for voice agents co-developed with the Pipecat team. The protocol defines how audio metadata — such as tone or delivery cues — is passed to language models and how responses should be shaped.
The deal may also extend Deepgram’s reach beyond voice, as Pipecat was built to handle real-time communication across multiple formats.