The challenge for many tech companies is to provide users with high-bandwidth multimodal data (e.g., simultaneous audio and video) in real time without interruption. Some companies build solutions in-house, but these require a lot of maintenance and maintenance.
To ease the burden, Russ D’SA and David Zhao have created LiveKit, an open source software package for building apps that can send real-time audio and video. They launched the project in 2021 and suspected it could soon be a business possibility.
That was a good feeling. LiveKit currently has “over 500 paid customers and over 100,000 developers across cloud platforms and open source products,” according to D’SA. He also said it is “the backbone of about 25% of 911 emergency calls in the United States,” and “used by large aerospace companies for launch and flight monitoring, Skydio, and Oracle and Adobe teams of various government applications, for teleo operations of police drones.”
It’s all because “large companies like Spotify, Oracle, Reddit and others were experimenting with LiveKit and asking for the version of the cloud host,” he told TechCrunch. “Think CloudFlare, but in the case of media streaming.” So, early Twitter engineers D’SA and Zhao, former engineering director at Motorola, decided to turn LiveKit into a startup and launch LiveKit Cloud, the managed version of the project.
Today, LiveKit, also in Openai’s ChatGpt Voice mode, offers SDKs, tools and APIs that allow developers and businesses to build streaming video and audio experiences. Startup customers include Tech Giants Spotify, Meta, Microsoft, and character AI, speeches, and fanatics.
The current focus of San Jose, California is growing its engineering and product teams, employing around 50 people, and expanding its core infrastructure. LiveKit is developing what D’SA calls “Elastic Agent Compute Service.” This means a product that allows you to deploy and scale or downgrade voices for “agents” like chatbots.
“We’ve found out that what LiveKit is ultimately building is “AIWS.” “What Stripe did to pay, LiveKit is doing it for communication.”
LiveKit’s finances are very sound in the meantime, D’Sa argues. Last year, the company’s operating rate exceeded $10 million. Recently, LiveKit raised $45 million in the Series B round led by Altimeter with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Hanabi Capital.