LiveKit raises $100M Series C to scale voice-native computing&AI.

LiveKit announced a $100 million Series C that pushes the startup past a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Index Ventures and includes new and returning strategic backers: Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Altimeter and Redpoint Ventures. Founder Russ d'Sa framed the financing as runway for an expanded developer stack and a global realtime network for voice-first apps.

The funding arrives as enterprises accelerate trials of spoken interfaces across support, insurance, healthcare and automotive. Voice is moving from experimental pilots into production at a growing set of companies — a shift that requires different engineering trade-offs than browser-based services. LiveKit’s pitch: combine SDKs, orchestration, model routing and observability into a single platform so teams can build, test, deploy and monitor voice agents with fewer blind spots.

At the technical level, voice-native systems are stateful and continuous: sessions can last minutes or hours, and latency and context management are critical. LiveKit says it is investing the new capital in three areas: expanding its global edge fabric to reduce round-trip time, extending orchestration so agents can route inference among multiple model providers with minimal disruption, and enhancing developer tooling for agent design and simulation.

Developers face both stochastic model behaviour and operational volatility when combining speech-to-text, LLM orchestration and text-to-speech in the same call. LiveKit argues this requires new verification approaches — statistical testing and large-scale simulation — alongside traditional unit testing. The company also highlighted recent launches aimed at simplifying deployment (serverless agents) and giving teams visibility into live calls (session replays, time-aligned transcripts and traces).

From a market perspective, the move is timely. Analysts and platform providers point to rapid uptake of voice interfaces in customer service and mobility; European enterprises in particular are exploring voice to cut contact-centre costs and improve accessibility. However, deploying voice at scale raises regulatory and localisation demands — data residency, telecom interconnects and low-latency regional routing — areas where LiveKit says it will accelerate investments, including deeper carrier links to the PSTN and more regional model hosting.

For investors, the round signals confidence in a platform approach to voice infrastructure rather than piecemeal toolchains. For builders, the promise is simpler operations and faster iteration cycles when moving from proof-of-concept to production. If LiveKit can deliver reliable, low-latency orchestration plus comprehensive observability, it could become a de-facto runtime for voice agents — a critical middleware layer between foundation models and consumer or enterprise applications.

With this Series C, LiveKit aims to turn voice from an occasional feature into a mainstream application surface — and to give developers the tools to scale it with the same predictability they expect from web platforms.