Deepgram Acquires Daily, Hands Pipecat to an Open Foundation

Voice AI company Deepgram is acquiring Daily, the real-time audio and video infrastructure firm behind Pipecat, one of the most widely used open source frameworks for building voice agents. The deal was announced on October 29, 2026, and the price was not disclosed. As part of the agreement, Pipecat will move to a new, independent Pipecat Foundation instead of becoming a Deepgram-owned project.

Deepgram Acquires Daily: What Changes for Pipecat

In an announcement on Daily’s blog, co-founder Kwindla Hultman Kramer said “nothing will change” for existing customers. Deepgram will sell, support and develop all of Daily’s current products, including its WebRTC network, telephony tools and cross-platform client libraries.

The bigger news for developers is the governance of Pipecat. The new foundation will be run by a steering committee that represents the wider real-time AI ecosystem, including companies that compete directly with Deepgram. Deepgram, for its part, is adopting Pipecat as the core of its new voice AI products.

Pipecat handles the hard parts of a voice agent: streaming audio between speech-to-text, large language model and text-to-speech components, switching between models, turn detection, interruptions and low-latency transport. According to Daily, the framework now has more than 200 integrations and almost 400 contributors, while the core team that built it numbers just 18 engineers.

Why Deepgram Wants an Open Framework

Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson told TechCrunch that he wants developers to use “the best models for your use case,” even when those models are not Deepgram’s. Alongside the deal, Deepgram is launching the Real-Time Context Standard (RCS), an open protocol for voice agents co-developed with the Pipecat team. It defines how signals from audio, such as a whisper, are passed to a language model along with guidance on how a reply should sound.

The two companies go back a long way. Both went through Y Combinator in 2016, and Deepgram has powered transcription inside Daily’s audio and video APIs since 2019. Daily has raised more than $62 million to date, according to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch, while Deepgram became a unicorn earlier this year with a $130 million Series C round.

What It Means for Voice AI Developers

Voice agents have become one of the fastest-moving areas of AI, with model makers such as ElevenLabs, which expanded its own conversational AI platform, and infrastructure players like LiveKit and Vapi all raising large rounds. Putting Pipecat under a neutral foundation is meant to reassure teams that their stack will not be locked to a single vendor.

The move also fits a wider push toward open agent tooling, from DeepSeek’s open source coding agent prototype to new desktop control tools for AI agents from Vercel. For Pipecat users, the practical takeaway is simple: existing projects keep working, the code stays open source, and Deepgram now has a much bigger engineering team behind the framework.