Deepgram buys Daily and moves Pipecat to an independent foundation

Deepgram buys Daily and moves Pipecat to an independent foundation

29 October 2026: Deepgram, the speech recognition and voice AI company, is acquiring Daily, which runs real-time audio and video infrastructure and created Pipecat, an open-source framework for building voice agents. Daily's co-founder Kwindla Hultman Kramer announced the deal and said that for Daily's customers and Pipecat users "nothing will change". Pipecat moves to an independent foundation governed by a steering committee that will include companies competing with Deepgram. No price has been disclosed.

Not yet independently verified. Not yet independently verified. This rests on Daily's own announcement by its co-founder; we did not read a Deepgram statement, and no price or closing date has been given. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Two companies that already worked together

Daily and Deepgram went through Y Combinator in the same 2016 batch, and Deepgram has supplied the transcription inside Daily's audio and video APIs since 2019. Daily built packet-routing software, compute clusters in dozens of locations and client libraries for embedding real-time audio and video in web, desktop and mobile apps. From 2023 it turned that infrastructure towards conversations between people and AI, and Pipecat grew out of that work.

Daily open-sourced Pipecat in 2024: the orchestration framework, client SDKs, the RTVI messaging standard, the Smart Turn turn-detection model, a WebRTC transport and the Flows library. The announcement puts it at more than 200 integrations and almost 400 contributors, and describes it as the most widely used voice agent framework, a claim we have not checked.

What changes and what Daily says stays

Deepgram will sell, support and develop all of Daily's current products, which include WebRTC, telephony and cross-platform libraries, and Deepgram is adopting Pipecat as the core of its own new voice AI products. Daily's team joins Deepgram and keeps working on Pipecat and the network infrastructure.

The foundation is the notable part. Pipecat is used with speech models from many vendors, including Deepgram's competitors, and a framework owned by one model vendor would give the others reason to fork it or walk away. Handing it to a foundation with a cross-industry steering committee is meant to keep it vendor neutral. The announcement does not yet name the committee members or say when the foundation will be set up.

For teams building on Daily or Pipecat

Customers paying Daily for WebRTC or telephony now have Deepgram as their supplier; contracts, pricing and data processing terms are the points to confirm as the deal completes. Teams using Pipecat with another speech provider should watch the foundation's charter and committee once published, since that is what keeps the framework neutral.

Our speech recognition software category lists 19 products and video conferencing software nine.

Company profile on TrustList: Daily

Related on TrustList:

• Deepslate raises 7.7 million euro for European speech-to-speech voice AI

Sources

• Daily: Deepgram is acquiring Daily and establishing an independent Pipecat Foundation (Kwindla Hultman Kramer), 29 October 2026