LiveKit funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

LiveKit builds the plumbing for real-time voice and video. Its software moves audio and video between people, apps, and AI models with low enough delay that a conversation feels natural. The core is open source, and the company makes money from LiveKit Cloud, a hosted version that runs the network, the agents, and the phone connections for customers.

LiveKit has raised about $183 million across five rounds since its founding in 2021, all of it equity. Its latest announced round, a Series C led by Index Ventures in January 2026, valued the company at $1 billion.

The company's best-known customer is OpenAI, whose ChatGPT voice mode runs on LiveKit. Behind it sits a short list of repeat backers, led by Redpoint Ventures and Altimeter, plus a long bench of AI founders as angels. Let's dive into LiveKit's funding history.

LiveKit spent its first three years on two small seed rounds and an open-source project. The money arrived once voice AI took off: three priced rounds in under two years, each at roughly three times the previous valuation.

Russ d'Sa and David Zhao met at Y Combinator in 2007, when both were building video streaming startups. D'Sa went on to be an early engineer at Twitter, and Zhao led engineering teams at Motorola. They launched LiveKit in July 2021 as an open-source project for building live audio and video into any app, a field then led by paid APIs from companies such as Agora and Twilio.

Redpoint Ventures led the seed, announced in December 2021, through partners Patrick Chase, Satish Dharmaraj, and Medha Agarwal. Redpoint's case rested on open source: developers would adopt the free server first, and some would later pay for a hosted version. A group of operators and writers joined as angels, including Elad Gil, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, and newsletter writer Lenny Rachitsky.

A second seed tranche followed in September 2022. LiveKit never announced it, but the company's own totals and its share filings both point to it. Founders Inc joined Redpoint in that round.

The turn came in September 2023, when OpenAI chose LiveKit to carry ChatGPT's voice mode. A year later the two companies announced a wider partnership around OpenAI's Realtime API, with LiveKit's Agents framework as a way for developers to build their own voice apps on top of it.

Altimeter led the Series A in June 2024, through partners Jamin Ball and Brad Gerstner. The angel list read like a roster of the AI boom: Google's Jeff Dean, Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas, Replit's Amjad Masad, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, and ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski. By then more than 20,000 developers were building on LiveKit.

Altimeter came back to lead the Series B in April 2025, and Mike Volpi's new fund, Hanabi Capital, made LiveKit its first investment. The company said the round brought its total to $83 million. It also came with a product push: Agents 1.0, Telephony 1.0, and a cloud service for running agents. TechCrunch reported that LiveKit's revenue run rate had passed $10 million in 2024, with more than 500 paying customers and about 50 employees.

Index Ventures led the $100 million Series C in January 2026, the first round led by a firm other than Redpoint or Altimeter. Salesforce Ventures joined as a new investor, and every previous lead put money back in. LiveKit by then counted more than 200,000 developers on its platform and said it handled billions of calls a year.

Company filings, as tracked by the secondary market platform Forge Global, show one more step. A Series C-1 in August 2026 raised about $40 million at roughly $1.45 billion after the money. LiveKit has not announced this round, its investors, or its terms, and its September 2026 press release still pointed to the Series C as its latest financing.

LiveKit's valuation has roughly tripled with each priced round since 2024. The seed-stage figures come from share filings rather than company announcements, so treat them as approximate.

The valuation barely moved in the two years before ChatGPT voice mode launched. Between the 2022 seed extension and the Series A it less than doubled, while LiveKit was still mostly an open-source project with a small hosted business.

The Series A came after the OpenAI deal but before most companies had shipped a voice agent. Forbes reported about $3 million of revenue for 2023, so investors at that price were buying the developer base and the OpenAI reference more than the income.

The Series B priced LiveKit at a little more than three times its Series A valuation, ten months later. Investors were paying for a position, not just for revenue. LiveKit had become the default way to connect a large language model to a live phone call or microphone, and OpenAI's choice served as a public reference.

The Series C nearly tripled the valuation again in nine months. A $1 billion price on a company that disclosed a $10 million run rate a year earlier implies investors expect revenue to compound with voice agent usage, which LiveKit charges for by the minute. The unannounced Series C-1 added another 45% or so, a smaller step that looks more like a top-up than a new stage.

LiveKit's cap table is concentrated. Two firms led the first four rounds, and the angels are mostly founders and researchers who build on real-time AI themselves.

Redpoint Ventures is LiveKit's earliest institutional backer. It led the seed, joined every round since, and Redpoint partner Patrick Chase sits on the board alongside the two founders.

Altimeter led both the Series A and the Series B, an unusual double commitment from a crossover fund that mostly backs later-stage and public companies. Index Ventures led the Series C through partner Sahir Azam, who joined the board with the round. Index framed the deal around voice and vision becoming the main way people talk to software.

Salesforce Ventures is the one corporate investor named. The tie is commercial: Salesforce's Agentforce voice agents run on LiveKit, and LiveKit counts Salesforce among its customers. For context on the parent, Salesforce's ownership structure is widely held by index funds and institutions, so the venture arm's stake is a strategic bet, not a control position.

OpenAI is not an investor, despite being LiveKit's most visible customer. That keeps LiveKit free to sell the same infrastructure to OpenAI's rivals, including xAI, whose own multibillion-dollar funding rounds pay for the Grok products it builds.

The Series A drew the most recognizable names. Jeff Dean, Google's chief scientist, invested alongside Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity, Amjad Masad of Replit, the AI coding company, and Guillermo Rauch of Vercel. Mati Staniszewski, whose company sells synthetic voices that developers can plug into LiveKit agents, also joined; ElevenLabs' own funding history shows how much capital now sits in voice AI.

Logan Kilpatrick, Erik Bernhardsson, Rohan Anil, Demi Guo, and Matt Shumer round out the list. Most of them run or research products that need real-time audio, which makes them both investors and potential customers.

LiveKit sells infrastructure, so most of its spending goes into the network, the engineers who build it, and the products that sit on top of it. The company has not disclosed its burn rate.

LiveKit Cloud runs on servers rented from several cloud providers across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, rather than on hardware it owns. The goal is to keep each user close to a server so that audio arrives in under 100 milliseconds. The Series C release named new compute, storage, and network services as the first use of the money.

The company has also connected its network directly to phone carriers around the world. That matters because many voice agents answer ordinary phone calls, for example in customer support or 911 dispatch, where LiveKit says it supports about a quarter of US dispatch centers.

The Agents framework is open source and downloaded more than a million times a month. LiveKit makes money when those agents run on its cloud, which it charges for at about one cent per agent minute on paid plans, on top of monthly plans that start at $50.

The pricing ladder is built to catch developers early. A free tier needs no credit card and includes 1,000 agent minutes a month, and the larger plans add more concurrent sessions, cheaper phone minutes, and bandwidth discounts. Enterprise customers negotiate custom contracts with their own support and data-residency terms. LiveKit started charging only after companies such as Spotify, Oracle, and Reddit asked it to host the open-source server for them.

Since the Series B, LiveKit has added services that sit closer to the AI model itself. LiveKit Inference, launched in October 2025, routes calls to speech, language, and voice models through one interface. In November 2025 it added phone numbers, a no-code Agent Builder, and observability tools that let teams review what an agent said and why.

Headcount was about 50 in April 2025, and the company now has a chief revenue officer, Tom Davies, to lead enterprise sales. In September 2026 it made its first acquisition, Loophole Labs, for an undisclosed price. All eight of Loophole's engineers joined, along with its Substrate hypervisor, which LiveKit plans to use to start agents in under three seconds and run far more of them at once.

The pattern is the same as at other developer infrastructure companies: give away the framework, then charge for running it at scale. LangChain's funding follows a similar open-source path for text-based agents.

LiveKit's growth push is aimed at large companies putting voice agents into production. Its named customers already include OpenAI, xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, Meta, and Spotify, and CEO Russ d'Sa has said he expects 2026 to be the year voice AI is broadly deployed. Tesla, for one, uses LiveKit-powered agents for sales, support, and roadside assistance, a small part of a company whose ownership is dominated by Elon Musk and index funds. Telephony, healthcare, financial services, and robotics are the newer markets, with tools such as LiveKit Portal for operating robots remotely.

The product is moving from transport to a full agent platform. The Loophole Labs deal, the inference service, and per-second billing introduced in August 2026 all point to LiveKit running more of the agent itself, not only the connection. That puts it in closer competition with Pipecat, Vapi, and Retell on one side and with communications platforms such as Twilio, a public company, on the other.

LiveKit has no public IPO plans. The main risks are concentration and price: OpenAI's share of revenue is not disclosed, model labs could build their own real-time layer, and anyone can self-host the open-source core for free. The Series C and the quiet C-1 are paying for a bet that enough customers will prefer LiveKit's managed network to running their own, as OpenAI's voice products and its rivals scale.

LiveKit has raised about $183 million across five rounds, from a $7 million seed in 2021 to a $100 million Series C in January 2026. Share filings also show a $40 million Series C-1 in August 2026, which would bring the total to roughly $221 million. The company has not announced that round or reported any debt.

LiveKit's lead investors are Redpoint Ventures, Altimeter, and Index Ventures. Other backers include Hanabi Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Founders Inc, plus angels such as Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Aravind Srinivas, Amjad Masad, Guillermo Rauch, and Mati Staniszewski.

LiveKit was valued at $1 billion in its January 2026 Series C, up from $345 million in April 2025. Share filings point to about $1.45 billion after the unannounced Series C-1 in August 2026.

No. LiveKit is private and has not filed for an IPO. Its shares are not traded on any stock exchange.

LiveKit is owned by its founders, employees, and investors. Co-founders Russ d'Sa (CEO) and David Zhao (CTO) both sit on the board. The largest outside holders are likely Redpoint Ventures, which has joined every round, and Altimeter, which led two, though exact stakes are not public.