LiveKit Agents 1.0 Launches Alongside $45 Million Series B

In 2021, Russ d’Sa, formerly at Twitter, and David Zhao, a Motorola veteran, launched an open source project called LiveKit. At the time, it aimed to solve a growing but under-addressed problem: transmitting high-bandwidth, real-time audio and video with low latency, reliability, and scale. Within months, large companies like Spotify, Oracle, and Reddit began asking for a managed version. That interest led to LiveKit Cloud, a commercial layer built atop their open source foundation. Today, LiveKit powers media infrastructure for names like Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, and counts over 100,000 developers on its cloud and open source platforms. The company, which began during the pandemic as a tool to make communication easier, has now positioned itself at the core of the voice AI boom.