LiveKit, the San Jose-based infrastructure provider for real-time voice and video AI, has vaulted into unicorn status with a $100 million Series C funding round that pegs its valuation at $1 billion. Index Ventures led the investment, joined by Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Altimeter Capital and Redpoint Ventures, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $183 million across multiple rounds, according to data from SiliconANGLE.

Co-founder and CEO Russ d’Sa announced the milestone in a Jan. 22 blog post, highlighting LiveKit’s role in enabling over 200,000 developers and teams to build AI agents that interact in real time. The platform powered OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice Mode and now supports applications in financial services, healthcare, retail, customer support, education and robotics, as detailed in PYMNTS.

“Today, large enterprises are evaluating and building voice agents to automate workflows, improve customer experiences and unlock new revenue,” d’Sa wrote. He pointed to production-scale deployments like Agentforce voice agents handling customer support for top brands and Tesla’s use of voice AI for sales, support, insurance and roadside assistance.

From Open-Source Roots to AI Backbone

Founded in 2021 by d’Sa and David Zhao as an open-source project using WebRTC to simplify real-time audio and video apps, LiveKit evolved into a managed cloud platform amid surging demand for voice AI, per Bloomberg. Its Selective Forwarding Unit efficiently routes media streams without decoding or re-encoding, slashing latency and bandwidth costs, as explained in SiliconANGLE.

The company’s Agent Framework, launched in open-source form in September 2023 in collaboration with OpenAI, lets developers attach Python or Node.js programs to ‘rooms’ for real-time AI behaviors like speech processing and responses. LiveKit Agents 1.0, released alongside the prior $45 million Series B in April 2025, added pipeline nodes, synchronized captioning, multilingual semantic turn detection across 13 languages and Telephony 1.0 with HD audio support, according to the LiveKit Series B blog.

By the Series B, LiveKit Cloud supported over 100,000 developers handling 3 billion calls annually, powering a quarter of U.S. 911 emergency dispatch centers—saving at least one life weekly—and enterprise tools from Hello Patient for hospital workflows and Podium for sales and support.

Unicorn Momentum in Voice AI Surge

Index Ventures partner Sahir Azam called LiveKit “one of the most important infrastructure layers in the AI stack” in a blog post cited by PYMNTS. “In the near term, voice agents are becoming the first line of interaction in call centers and customer workflows. As robotics and autonomy take off, the same underlying requirements will apply to systems interacting with the physical world through cameras, microphones and sensors.”

Salesforce Ventures echoed the praise: “What stands out most to us is the team’s developer-first ethos. LiveKit doesn’t just make real-time AI possible; it makes it accessible, composable and scalable for teams of all sizes,” per SiliconANGLE. Customers now span xAI, Meta Platforms, Spotify, Salesforce and Tesla, with LiveKit powering Grok voice experiences in Tesla vehicles and apps, as noted in various reports.

The Series C follows rapid growth: From a $22.5 million Series A in 2024 led by Altimeter—at a then-$110 million valuation, per prior coverage—to the $45 million Series B, reflecting explosive adoption. LiveKit Inference integrates models from OpenAI, Google, Deepgram, Cartesia and ElevenLabs for voice agents.

Enterprise Deployments and Technical Edge

d’Sa anticipates “2026 will be the year voice AI will be broadly deployed across thousands of use cases around the world,” citing proof-of-concepts maturing into production, as in LiveKit’s Series C blog. Use cases include processing claims, tutoring students, triaging patients, supporting customers and interviewing candidates.

LiveKit’s edge network and SDKs span web, mobile, Flutter and Unity, enabling multimodal apps. It supports physical AI models alongside voice and video, positioning it for robotics, per Bloomberg. Developers run Agents on laptops for dev and scale via Cloud Agents beta for stateful orchestration, load balancing and failover.

Recent X discussions underscore the buzz: Posts from @Investclubsv hailed LiveKit’s unicorn entry, while @AI_Techie_Arun noted interfaces like voice drive monetization around LLMs. Funding will accelerate platform growth, team expansion and all-in-one AI agent capabilities that “see, hear and speak,” as d’Sa stated in the Series B post.

Challenges and the Road Ahead

While voice AI booms, LiveKit faces competition from players like ElevenLabs and SoundHound, though its open-source ethos and partnerships differentiate it. The platform’s shift from free tool to enterprise cloud mirrors broader AI infra trends, with healthy financials—over $10 million run rate pre-Series B, per TechCrunch reports on earlier rounds.

Investors bet on voice supplanting keyboards as the primary computer interface. “Voice will become the default way we interact with computers and LiveKit is positioned to be the backbone of this paradigm shift,” d’Sa wrote in the Series B announcement. With $100 million in hand, LiveKit aims to deliver that infrastructure at global scale.