Voice AI Infrastructure Firm Deepgram Announces Acquisition of Pipecat Maker Daily, Pledges Open Source and Launches New Protocol
Deepgram announces acquisition of Daily and its open-source framework Pipecat to consolidate real-time voice and video infrastructure, while introducing the new RCS standard.
US-based voice AI infrastructure company Deepgram announced on October 29, 2026, that it is acquiring Daily, the developer and maintainer of the popular open-source voice AI framework Pipecat. The companies did not disclose the deal amount but confirmed that Pipecat will remain open-source.
Pipecat is an orchestration framework that manages voice and video streams along with components like speech-to-text (STT), large language models, and text-to-speech (TTS) to reduce latency. Daily itself provides hosted infrastructure for voice and video calls. This acquisition is expected to give Deepgram deeper expertise in real-time multimodal infrastructure and expand its capabilities beyond pure voice.
Both companies are alumni of the 2016 Y Combinator batch. According to PitchBook data, Daily had previously raised over $62 million from investors including Tiger Global and Highfield Capital; Deepgram reached unicorn status earlier in 2026 with a $130 million Series C round.
Kwindla Kramer, co-founder of Daily, stated that they chose Deepgram due to CEO Scott Stephenson's commitment to keeping Pipecat permanently open-source and vendor-neutral, as well as the matching engineering cultures. Stephenson noted that the move aims to open up the ecosystem so developers can use the best models for their specific use cases, not just Deepgram's own products.
Alongside the acquisition, Deepgram launched the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol co-developed with the Pipecat team. The protocol defines metadata such as whispers and instructions within audio, as well as response guidance, aiming to standardize how voice agents are built.