Delivering real-time, high-bandwidth multimedia content, such as simultaneous audio and video, poses substantial technical challenges for many technology companies. Developing in-house solutions for these complex tasks often demands considerable resources in both setup and ongoing maintenance. Recognizing this industry pain point, Russ d’Sa and David Zhao launched LiveKit in 2021—an open-source software package specifically designed to simplify the process of building real-time audio and video streaming applications.
Initially envisioned as a developer-friendly project, LiveKit rapidly gained traction—attracting major enterprise users such as Spotify, Reddit, and Oracle, who sought a reliable cloud-hosted version to streamline their real-time communications needs. Encouraged by the clear market demand, d’Sa, previously a lead engineer at Twitter, and Zhao, who once directed engineering efforts at Motorola, formalized their project into a startup named LiveKit Cloud.
Fast-forward to today: LiveKit has amassed an impressive customer base of more than 500 paying organizations and boasts over 100,000 active developers leveraging both its cloud platform and open-source innovations. Importantly, the technology now powers roughly 25% of emergency 911 calls across the United States, along with vital operations in aerospace––including observation capabilities during launches and flights. The platform is also critical for the remote teleoperation of police drones by firms like Skydio, and supports several governmental applications in partnership with global technology providers such as Oracle and Adobe.
Notably, LiveKit’s infrastructure serves as the real-time backbone for OpenAI’s widely adopted ChatGPT Voice Mode, further demonstrating its ability to manage intensive, high-scale streaming workloads. Among its diverse clientele are industry giants Meta, Microsoft, and Spotify, as well as AI specialists like Character AI, and innovative ventures including Speak and Fanatics.
Based in San Jose, California, LiveKit now employs around 50 people and remains actively committed to bolstering its engineering and product development teams. An emerging initiative, as described by d’Sa, focuses on creating an elastic computing solution specifically designed to manage voice-oriented AI deployments, enabling rapid and automatic scaling for virtual agents and chatbots.
In essence, according to the founders, LiveKit is shaping up to be an “AIWS”—an artificial intelligence-native cloud provider. “Just as Stripe redefined online payments,” d’Sa says, “we believe LiveKit is positioned to similarly revolutionize real-time multimedia communications.”
Financially, the company appears robust. Last year’s operation surpassed a $10 million run rate, and it recently confirmed the completion of a successful $45 million Series B financing round led by Altimeter, with additional support from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Hanabi Capital.
