The next generation of AI doesn’t just read and write — it sees, hears, speaks, and acts in the world. But building these systems is fundamentally different from building traditional web applications. Voice and multimodal agents must operate across telephony, web, and mobile environments; process streaming audio and video; respond in milliseconds; coordinate multiple AI models in real time; manage turn-taking and interruptions; and reliably scale thousands of long-lived, stateful sessions.
Until now, the infrastructure required to make this possible simply didn’t exist.
Founded by Russ d’Sa and David Zhao, LiveKit is building the nervous system for multimodal AI. Their end-to-end platform gives developers everything they need to build, deploy, and operate real-time AI agents — from SDKs for voice and video frontends, to a backend framework for agent logic, to a global cloud runtime that enables autoscaling, observability, and production-grade reliability.
LiveKit is already powering some of the most demanding real-time AI workloads in the world, with customers including xAI, Meta, and Spotify — a signal of both technical excellence and deep trust from leading builders.
What stands out most to us is the team’s developer-first ethos. Russ and David have a rare clarity of vision around where multimodal AI is headed, and, more importantly, what abstractions developers will need to build in that future. LiveKit doesn’t just make real-time AI possible; it makes it accessible, composable, and scalable for teams of all sizes.
We’re thrilled to partner with LiveKit on their Series C as they become the foundational infrastructure layer for the next era of AI-driven applications.
Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Russ, David, and the entire LiveKit team.
