A challenge for many tech companies is delivering high-bandwidth, multimodal data — for example, simultaneous audio and video — to users in real time without interruptions. Some firms build solutions in-house, but these often require a lot of upkeep and maintenance.
To ease the burden, Russ d’Sa and David Zhao created LiveKit, an open-source software package for building apps that can transmit real-time audio and video. They launched the project in 2021 and soon suspected it had business potential.
It was a good hunch. LiveKit now has “more than 500 paying customers and over 100,000 developers across its cloud platform and open source products,” according to d’Sa. He also says it’s the “backbone for roughly 25% of 911 emergency calls in the U.S.” and “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 all started when “large companies like Spotify, Oracle, and Reddit were experimenting with LiveKit and asked us for a cloud-hosted version of it,” d’Sa told TechCrunch. “Think Cloudflare, but for media streaming.” So d’Sa, an early Twitter engineer, and Zhao, former director of engineering at Motorola, decided to turn LiveKit into a startup and launch a managed version of the project: LiveKit Cloud.
Today, LiveKit, which also powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice Mode, offers SDKs, tools, and APIs that allow developers and companies to build streaming video and audio experiences. The startup’s customers include tech giants Spotify, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as Character AI, Speak, and Fanatics.
The current focus of the San Jose, Calif., company is growing its engineering and product teams — it employs around 50 people — and expanding its core infrastructure. LiveKit is also developing what d’Sa calls an “elastic agent compute service,” meaning a product that can deploy and automatically 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 said. “What Stripe did for payments, LiveKit is doing for communications.”
LiveKit’s financials are quite healthy in the meantime, d’Sa claims. Last year, the company’s run rate was over $10 million. Recently, LiveKit raised $45 million in a Series B round led by Altimeter, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Hanabi Capital.
