LiveKit raised $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures with Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Altimeter, and Redpoint Ventures participating. The open-source-born infrastructure provider powers the real-time voice capabilities behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice mode, xAI’s Grok Voice Agent API for Tesla vehicles, and hundreds of enterprise voice AI deployments.

The funding addresses a fundamental infrastructure bottleneck: building production-ready voice AI requires orchestrating speech-to-text, language models, text-to-speech, and real-time communication protocols—a complex technical challenge that most companies struggle to solve in-house. LiveKit abstracts this complexity into a unified platform, turning months of infrastructure development into minutes of deployment.

Crustdata secured $6 million in seed funding to power real-time data infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents that need live, actionable intelligence rather than static datasets.

The Y Combinator-backed startup addresses a fundamental bottleneck: autonomous agents require fresh data to make effective decisions, but most existing data sources provide outdated snapshots that limit agent capabilities in dynamic business environments.

The Stale Data Bottleneck

Enterprise AI agents face a critical infrastructure gap between the speed of business change and the freshness of available data. Traditional data providers update company and people information weekly, monthly, or even quarterly—leaving agents operating on obsolete intelligence when tracking funding rounds, executive moves, hiring patterns, or market developments.

AI agents process over 1 million queries per month through Tavily’s search infrastructure, yet most agents still can’t reliably access real-time web data. This fundamental bottleneck—agents relying on outdated training data while enterprises demand current information—has created a critical infrastructure gap that Tavily just raised $25 million to solve.

The Series A round, led by Insight Partners and Alpha Wave Global, validates the urgent need for purpose-built web access infrastructure as enterprises deploy AI agents at scale. Unlike generic search APIs that break under agent workloads, Tavily’s platform delivers structured, precise data directly into agent workflows—addressing hallucinations and context gaps that plague current deployments.