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 companies construct options in-house, however these typically require quite a lot of repairs 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 undertaking in 2021 and shortly suspected it had enterprise potential.
It was a very good hunch. LiveKit now has “greater than 500 paying clients and over 100,000 builders throughout its cloud platform and open supply merchandise,” in line with d’Sa. He additionally says it’s the “spine for roughly 25% of 911 emergency calls within the U.S.” and is “utilized by giant aerospace firms for launch and flight commentary, Skydio for police drones teleoperation, and groups at Oracle and Adobe in numerous authorities purposes.”
It began when “giant firms like Spotify, Oracle, and Reddit have been experimenting with LiveKit and requested us for a cloud-hosted model of it,” d’Sa advised TechCrunch. “Assume Cloudflare, however 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 undertaking: LiveKit Cloud.
Immediately, LiveKit, which additionally powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice Mode, presents SDKs, instruments, and APIs that permit builders and firms to construct streaming video and audio experiences. The startup’s clients embrace tech giants Spotify, Meta, and Microsoft, in addition to Character AI, Communicate, 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 be creating what d’Sa calls an “elastic agent compute service,” that means a product that may deploy and robotically scale up or down voice “brokers” like chatbots.
“It seems what LiveKit is finally constructing is ‘AIWS’ — an AI-native cloud supplier,” d’Sa stated. “What Stripe did for funds, LiveKit is doing for communications.”
LiveKit’s financials are fairly wholesome within the meantime, d’Sa claims. Final 12 months, the corporate’s run fee was over $10 million. Not too long ago, LiveKit raised $45 million in a Collection B spherical led by Altimeter, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Hanabi Capital.