Pipecat is a framework that manages voice and video streams alongside other parts of the pipeline, such as speech-to-text, large language models and text-to-speech models, while reducing latency. Daily itself provides hosted infrastructure for voice and video calls. Daily has raised more than $62 million to date from investors including Tiger Global, Nat Friedman and Lachy Groom, according to PitchBook data, while Deepgram reached unicorn status earlier this year with a $130 million Series C round.

The two companies go back a long way: both were in the same Y Combinator batch in 2016. 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 Pipecat. He told TechCrunch that Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson's commitment to keeping Pipecat "open source and vendor-neutral forever" was a key reason Daily favoured the deal.

Stephenson said the acquisition lets developers build voice agents by plugging in different models, and that Deepgram wants users to pick the best models for their use case even when they are not Deepgram's own. Alongside the deal, Deepgram is launching Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team that defines how metadata such as audio context, model instructions and response guidance flows through a voice agent.