In 2021, LiveKit's founders recognized a critical gap in the developer infrastructure landscape: the tools for building real-time audio and video experiences were fragmented, complex, and ill-suited for the emerging era of AI-powered interactions. They started LiveKit as an open source project to make building real-time applications significantly easier for developers everywhere.
What began with a media server and some SDKs has evolved into a comprehensive developer platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. Today, over 200,000 developers and teams - from leading AI and robotics labs to Fortune 500 companies - rely on LiveKit as the default infrastructure layer for building AI that can interact with the world in real time. The platform powers OpenAI's ChatGPT voice mode, facilitates billions of calls annually, and enables seamless multimodal AI interactions across web, mobile, and embedded devices.