Open Source Real-Time Communication: Our Investment in LiveKit
By: Patrick Chase, Satish Dharmaraj, and Medha Agarwal
Today we are excited to announce that Redpoint is leading a $7M seed round in LiveKit. LiveKit is building an open source platform for real-time communication that allows engineers to add audio and video into their applications with just a few lines of code.
Over the last few years, there has been explosive growth in video. Workers, teachers, students, doctors, and many more moved their businesses online and needed real-time audio and video to do their work. We’ve seen startups building virtual offices, online events platforms like Hopin reach massive scale, companies like Figma adding audio, and countless companies both big and small building towards the metaverse. The communication platform-as-a-service market is expected to grow to $17B by 2024 and the video streaming market is expected to reach $15B by 2026.
One common theme across all of these companies: building scalable audio and video infrastructure in-house is extremely hard and time consuming. In addition, it is not something that most companies view as core to their business. This creates a huge opportunity to improve the development experience and allow engineers to add video to their apps with a few lines of code — like Stripe does with payments.
LiveKit is at the intersection of two spaces Redpoint has invested in a lot over the last 20 years: open source and infrastructure. On the infrastructure side, we have been fortunate to invest in companies like Stripe, Twilio, and Snowflake. When we see a shift like the move to the cloud or the growth of e-commerce, we love to invest in the infrastructure to enable that shift. We believe real-time communication is another large and growing market in need of better tools for developers.
On the open source side we love investing in open source companies building core tools for developers. It allows developers to easily try products, avoid vendor lock-in, and build vibrant communities. LiveKit is bringing open source to video infra and building with the modern stack in mind. They are open-source, horizontally scalable, and written in Go. This approach reminded us of CockroachDB who also chose to build in Go and focus on scale from the beginning.
We have been fortunate to get to know Russ d’Sa and David Zhao over the last couple of years. We have known we wanted to work with them for a long time and knew we wanted to invest in the video infrastructure market as well. Stars aligned when we reconnected to discuss LiveKit and we are thrilled to lead their seed round alongside an incredible group of angels including Elad Gil, Justin Kan, Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Draper, Packy McCormick, Emil Ivov, and Cailen d’Sa.
If you are excited about video infrastructure and want to work alongside an incredible group of people, LiveKit is hiring.
