Deepgram is acquiring Daily, pledging to keep its voice AI framework open

Deepgram is bringing the company behind Pipecat inside its business while promising to keep the voice AI framework open to rival providers. The October 29, 2026, acquisition announcement pairs the purchase of Daily with an unchanged open-source license and a planned independent foundation—a commitment to preserve developer choice as the team joins a model supplier.

Buying the connections between models

Pipecat coordinates the parts of a live voice or video application: incoming streams, speech recognition, a language model and generated speech. Daily supplies hosted infrastructure for real-time calls. The acquisition brings that networking and coordination work together with Deepgram’s speech models, rather than simply adding another model to its catalog.

The framework handles jobs that sit between individual models, including streaming data, detecting when someone has finished speaking and handling interruptions. It also lets developers switch models and manage the context carried through a conversation. Those are coordination tasks across the application, not just questions of how accurately one model recognizes or generates speech.

Daily co-founder Kwindla Hultman Kramer says Deepgram is adopting Pipecat at the core of its new voice AI products and services. Daily’s team will join Deepgram, and Kramer will become its head of open source. The companies did not disclose the purchase price, TechCrunch reported.

Keeping Pipecat open was fundamental to our decision to join Deepgram.

Kwindla Hultman Kramer, Daily co-founder, in Deepgram’s announcement

A seat for Deepgram’s competitors

The licensing commitment is specific: Deepgram says Pipecat will remain free under its existing BSD V2 license. It also promises to invest in the framework’s development and community while keeping it vendor neutral. Developers would retain the ability to combine models, tools, network transport and software interfaces from different providers.

Governance is a separate part of that promise. In Daily’s announcement, Kramer says the independent Pipecat Foundation will be managed by a steering committee representing the wider real-time AI ecosystem, including companies that compete with Deepgram. The foundation is being established, rather than presented as an already operating governing body.

Kramer told TechCrunch that openness also has a commercial rationale: a company supplying strong components can benefit from sitting inside a growing ecosystem. Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson said developers should use the best models for their needs, including partners’ models where Deepgram has ground to make up. His stated approach is to improve Deepgram’s offerings rather than require developers to use them.

Continuity for Daily’s customers

Daily’s customer-facing pledge covers more than Pipecat. Kramer says Deepgram will continue to sell, support and develop all of Daily’s current products and services. He identifies several areas of infrastructure that will gain access to Deepgram’s engineering team:

• WebRTC infrastructure for real-time audio and video connections.
• Telephony infrastructure for phone-based applications.
• Cross-platform libraries that help developers embed communications in their applications.

The companies already have a working history. Both went through Y Combinator in 2016, and Deepgram has powered transcription in Daily’s audio-video interfaces since 2019. Daily began experimenting with real-time AI agents in 2023, extending infrastructure originally built for communication between people into conversations between people and AI.

Daily made Pipecat open source in 2024. By the acquisition announcement, it counted more than 200 integrations and almost 400 contributors, according to Kramer. He also describes uses beyond customer-support calls, including drones, toys and applications running on devices or across local and cloud systems. The promised continuity therefore reaches beyond developers building conventional phone agents.