A problem for a lot of tech firms is delivering high-bandwidth, multimodal knowledge — for instance, simultaneous audio and video — to customers in actual time with out interruptions. Some corporations construct options in-house, however these usually require numerous maintenance and upkeep.
To ease the burden, Russ d’Sa and David Zhao created LiveKit, an open supply software program package deal for constructing apps that may transmit real-time audio and video. They launched the venture in 2021 and shortly suspected it had enterprise potential.
It was hunch. LiveKit now has “more than 500 paying customers and over 100,000 developers across its cloud platform and open source products,” in keeping with d’Sa. He additionally says it’s the “backbone for roughly 25% of 911 emergency calls in the U.S.” and is “used by large aerospace companies for launch and flight observation, Skydio for police drones teleoperation, and teams at Oracle and Adobe in various government applications.”
It began when “large companies like Spotify, Oracle, and Reddit were experimenting with LiveKit and asked us for a cloud-hosted version of it,” d’Sa instructed TechCrunch. “Think Cloudflare, but for media streaming.” So d’Sa, an early Twitter engineer, and Zhao, former director of engineering at Motorola, determined to show LiveKit right into a startup and launch a managed model of the venture: LiveKit Cloud.
At present, LiveKit, which additionally powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice Mode, presents SDKs, instruments, and APIs that enable builders and corporations to construct streaming video and audio experiences. The startup’s prospects embrace tech giants Spotify, Meta, and Microsoft, in addition to Character AI, Converse, and Fanatics.
The present focus of the San Jose, California, firm is rising its engineering and product groups — it employs round 50 folks — and increasing its core infrastructure. LiveKit can also be creating what d’Sa calls an “elastic agent compute service,” that means a product that may deploy and mechanically scale up or down voice “agents” like chatbots.
“It turns out what LiveKit is ultimately building is ‘AIWS’ — an AI-native cloud provider,” d’Sa mentioned. “What Stripe did for payments, LiveKit is doing for communications.”
LiveKit’s financials are fairly wholesome within the meantime, d’Sa claims. Final yr, the corporate’s run price was over $10 million. Just lately, LiveKit raised $45 million in a Collection B spherical led by Altimeter, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Hanabi Capital.
