Real-time, high-bandwidth communication is one of the biggest technical hurdles facing modern tech platforms — especially when it involves simultaneous audio and video data. Addressing this complex challenge, LiveKit Voice Mode has emerged as a powerful solution enabling real-time, multimodal communication across industries — from AI applications to public safety networks.
Founded in 2021 by Russ d’Sa and David Zhao, LiveKit began as an open-source toolkit designed to simplify the development of apps that require real-time audio and video streaming. Fast forward to today, the company has evolved into a robust platform powering mission-critical communications, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT Voice Mode, and even 25% of 911 emergency calls in the U.S.
From Experiment to Essential Infrastructure
The idea for LiveKit took root when companies like Reddit, Spotify, and Oracle started experimenting with its open-source tools. They quickly expressed a need for a hosted, cloud-managed version — something akin to “Cloudflare for media streaming,” said d’Sa. That insight led the founders to launch LiveKit Cloud, transforming their side project into a full-scale startup.
Russ d’Sa, an early Twitter engineer, and David Zhao, a former Motorola director of engineering, designed LiveKit with one core goal: to reduce the friction and maintenance cost of building high-performance, real-time communication systems.
Their instincts proved right. According to d’Sa, LiveKit now serves more than 500 paying customers and over 100,000 developers, spanning both its cloud and open-source offerings.
Powering AI, Drones, and Public Safety
While LiveKit Voice Mode has gained headlines for its integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the platform’s use cases go far beyond generative AI. The system plays a central role in numerous industries:
- Emergency Services: LiveKit is the backbone for approximately a quarter of all 911 calls in the United States.
- Aerospace: Major aerospace companies rely on the platform for launch and flight observation.
- Law Enforcement: Drone maker Skydio uses LiveKit for real-time drone teleoperation in police operations.
- Enterprise Solutions: Teams at Oracle and Adobe use the system for secure government-facing applications.
Developer-First: SDKs, APIs, and Elastic Compute
The current iteration of LiveKit offers a suite of SDKs, APIs, and developer tools to build highly responsive, audio-visual streaming experiences. Whether you’re building a virtual meeting app, a voice bot, or an interactive AI companion, LiveKit Voice Mode can handle the load — automatically scaling to meet demand in real time.
The company is also working on an “elastic agent compute service,” a next-gen tool for deploying voice-based AI agents like chatbots that can spin up or down automatically based on need.
“It turns out what LiveKit is ultimately building is ‘AIWS’ — an AI-native cloud provider,” d’Sa explains. “What Stripe did for payments, LiveKit is doing for communications.”
Financial Momentum and Big-Name Clients
Financially, LiveKit is in a strong position. The company recently raised $45 million in a Series B round led by Altimeter, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Hanabi Capital. It reports a run rate exceeding $10 million as of last year — a strong signal of both demand and customer satisfaction.
Some of the platform’s major customers include Meta, Spotify, Microsoft, Fanatics, Character AI, and Speak — a who’s who of tech innovators relying on LiveKit’s infrastructure for real-time engagement.
Building the Future of Communication
Headquartered in San Jose, California, LiveKit currently employs around 50 people and is heavily investing in its engineering and product teams. Its vision extends beyond just streaming video and voice. With initiatives like the elastic agent service and deeper AI integrations, the company is positioning itself as a foundational player in what could be the next era of AI-native infrastructure.
By solving the problem of seamless, real-time communication at scale, LiveKit Voice Mode is not only powering chatbots and emergency calls — it’s quietly becoming the engine behind the digital conversations of the future.
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