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A challenge for many tech companies is delivering high - bandwidth , multimodal data — for example , simultaneous sound recording and video — to users in real time without interruptions . Some business firm build solutions in - house , but these often require a lot of upkeep and care .
To ease the burden , Russ d’Sa and David Zhao createdLiveKit , an open source software package for construction apps that can air real - prison term audio frequency and video . They launched the labor in 2021 and presently surmise it had business enterprise potency .
It was a just hunch . LiveKit now has “ more than 500 paying customers and over 100,000 developers across its cloud platform and open source Cartesian product , ” according to d’Sa . He also says it ’s the “ backbone for roughly 25 % of 911 parking brake calls in the U.S. ” and is “ used by bombastic aerospace company for launch and flight observation , Skydio for police drones teleoperation , and squad at Oracle and Adobe in various government applications programme . ”
It all started when “ large companies like Spotify , Oracle , and Reddit were experimenting with LiveKit and asked us for a cloud - hosted interpretation of it , ” d’Sa tell apart TechCrunch . “ Think Cloudflare , but for media streaming . ” So d’Sa , an former Twitter engineer , and Zhao , former conductor of engineering at Motorola , decide to turn LiveKit into a startup and launch a managed version of the undertaking : LiveKit Cloud .
Today , LiveKit , which also power OpenAI’sChatGPT Voice Mode , offers SDKs , tools , and APIs that allow developers and companies to build streaming television and audio experience . The startup ’s customers include tech giants Spotify , Meta , and Microsoft , as well as Character AI , Speak , and Fanatics .
The current focal point of the San Jose , California , company is growing its engineering and product squad — it employs around 50 people — and expound its core infrastructure . LiveKit is also develop what d’Sa squall an “ elastic agent compute service , ” meaning a production that can deploy and automatically scale up or down voice “ agents ” like chatbots .
“ It turns out what LiveKit is finally construct is ‘ AIWS ’ — an AI - native swarm provider , ” d’Sa enounce . “ What Stripe did for defrayal , LiveKit is doing for communication . ”
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LiveKit ’s financials are quite healthy in the meantime , d’Sa claims . Last year , the company ’s run rate was over $ 10 million . late , LiveKit raised $ 45 million in a Series B one shot lead by Altimeter , with involvement from Redpoint Ventures and Hanabi Capital .
