LiveKit Reaches $1 Billion Valuation as Voice AI Infrastructure Heats Up

LiveKit raised $100 million in a Series C round that values the voice AI infrastructure company at $1 billion, the company announced on Wednesday. The funding positions LiveKit as a critical piece of plumbing for the voice AI applications proliferating across industries from healthcare to customer support.

Index Ventures led the round, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi Capital, and existing investors Altimeter Capital and Redpoint Ventures. The funding brings LiveKit’s total raised to $183 million.

LiveKit powers the real-time audio and video infrastructure behind some of the highest-profile AI products in the market. Its most prominent customer is OpenAI, where LiveKit’s technology enables ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode—the feature that lets ChatGPT’s 800+ million weekly users have natural conversations with the AI assistant. Other customers include xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, Meta, Spotify, 911 emergency operators, and mental health providers.

The WebRTC Problem LiveKit Solved

The technical story behind LiveKit explains why voice AI companies keep showing up as customers. Real-time audio transmission over the internet requires WebRTC, a protocol designed specifically for low-latency communication. But implementing WebRTC directly involves significant complexity and scaling challenges that most AI companies don’t want to solve themselves.

LiveKit built open-source infrastructure that simplifies WebRTC deployment. The company has since expanded into a global network of data centers optimized for routing voice and video data, handling billions of calls annually between voice agents and users across web, mobile, and telephone channels.

When OpenAI launched the Realtime API in October 2024, the company partnered directly with LiveKit to give developers the tools to build apps using the same technology powering ChatGPT’s voice features. That partnership gave LiveKit visibility across the developer community building voice AI applications—and made it the default infrastructure choice for many.

Voice AI’s Infrastructure Moment

The funding reflects a broader pattern: as AI applications mature, the infrastructure companies enabling them attract significant capital. Databricks recently raised at a $134 billion valuation on the strength of its data and AI platform. Cerebras signed a $10 billion deal with OpenAI for inference compute. LiveKit’s unicorn valuation follows the same logic—picks and shovels for the AI gold rush.

The voice AI market has expanded rapidly beyond consumer chatbots. Financial services firms use voice AI for customer authentication and advisory services. Healthcare providers deploy it for patient intake and triage. Retailers build voice-enabled shopping assistants. In each case, the underlying infrastructure needs to deliver audio with imperceptible latency—exactly what LiveKit specializes in.

LiveKit’s Agents framework, launched alongside its Series B in April 2025, provides a platform for building and deploying voice AI agents. The timing wasn’t accidental: voice AI had just gone from a feature inside ChatGPT to thousands of applications across industries. LiveKit anticipated the demand and built the developer tools to capture it.

What Comes Next

The company plans to use the funding to expand its compute, storage, and network services while scaling infrastructure for voice-driven and computer vision applications. LiveKit anticipates 2026 will be the year voice AI achieves broad deployment across thousands of use cases globally.

That prediction aligns with where major AI labs are heading. OpenAI has emphasized voice as a primary interface for AI interaction. Google’s Gemini includes voice capabilities across its product suite. Anthropic has been building voice features for Claude. As these models improve, the demand for infrastructure that can deliver their responses in real time will only grow.

For developers building voice AI applications, LiveKit’s unicorn status signals that the infrastructure layer is maturing. The company that started as an open-source project during the pandemic Zoom era has become essential plumbing for the voice AI era now unfolding.