Deepgram acquires Daily to bolster voice AI infrastructure with Pipecat framework

Oct 29, 2026

Voice AI company Deepgram announced on October 29, 2026, the acquisition of Daily, the developer behind the open-source voice framework Pipecat, for an undisclosed sum. Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer joins Deepgram as head of open source, while the companies launch an independent Pipecat Foundation to preserve vendor neutrality under its BSD V2 license. The acquisition follows Deepgram's $130 million Series C round in January 2026, which valued the company at $1.3 billion.

Deepgram acquisition of Daily

▪The Daily engineering team will join Deepgram as part of the acquisition, with Daily co-founder Kwindla Hultman Kramer serving as Deepgram's head of open source while Deepgram sells, supports, and develops Daily's existing product suite.
▪Deepgram announced that it is acquiring Daily, the developer and maintainer of the open-source voice AI framework Pipecat
▪Daily co-founder Kwindla Kramer chose Deepgram's acquisition offer over interest from other potential buyers because Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson committed to keeping Pipecat open source and vendor-neutral.

Pipecat open-source commitments and governance

▪Deepgram and Daily committed to keeping the Pipecat framework open source and free under its existing BSD V2 license.
▪Deepgram and Daily are establishing an independent Pipecat Foundation governed by a steering committee that will include competing companies to manage the framework.

Pipecat framework features and scale

▪Pipecat is an open-source framework that orchestrates voice and video streams while linking speech-to-text, large language models, and text-to-speech components to minimize latency in AI applications.
▪The Pipecat framework features over 200 integrations and almost 400 contributors, having been built by 18 engineers at Daily.

Daily background and development

▪Daily began experimenting with AI-to-human communication over voice and text around the release of GPT-4, eventually resulting in the Pipecat framework.
▪Daily provides hosted infrastructure for real-time voice and video calls across a global network of 75 points of presence and has raised over $62 million in funding from investors including Tiger Global.

Prior collaboration between Deepgram and Daily

▪Deepgram co-developed the Real-Time Context Standard open protocol with the Pipecat team to pass audio context metadata—such as whispers, tone, and model guidance—between voice agent components.
▪Both Deepgram and Daily participated in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016, and Deepgram models have powered transcription inside Daily products since 2019.

Deepgram valuation and business growth

▪Deepgram earmarked its January 2026 Series C funding for international expansion, new AI models, and acquisitions such as restaurant voice AI company OfOne.
▪Deepgram raised a $130 million Series C funding round in January 2026, achieving a valuation of $1.3 billion.
▪Deepgram reports that its speech models are used in production by over 5,000 organizations and 200,000 developers, having processed over 50,000 years of audio.

Deepgram product developments

▪Deepgram expanded its Nova-3 speech recognition model to support 55 languages as part of its product strategy.
▪Deepgram rolled out a self-hosted voice AI platform as part of its recent product strategy.