d’Sa: Most Voice AI Platforms Like Vapi Run on LiveKit
Russ d’Sa · His startup powers OpenAI's Voice Mode. Last month, they became a unicorn. | Russ d’Sa, Co-Founde... · PMF Show · Feb 23, 2026 · at 46:12
LiveKit co-founder Russ d'Sa explains how AI voice companies rely on LiveKit's real-time WebRTC infrastructure.
0:00 / 0:09exact quote · 9.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So VAPI and like land and retail and some of these, most of them actually are built on top of LiveKit. And so they use our infrastructure for all of the transport.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Russ d’Sa
Russ d’Sa: Voice will become the primary computer interface in 5-10 years
“Most of the internet is still built around text and that is going to shift in a huge way over the next five to 10 years as the models become smarter and more human-like you interact with them in more human-like ways like voice, right? Is the primary way we int…”
d'Sa: OpenAI secretly built Voice Mode on LiveKit via a personal Gmail
“I get an email from open AI and it's like, Hey, so we signed up for a live kit cloud in secret with a personal Gmail address three weeks ago, and we've built this voice interface, like on top of you guys. And now we're like fans and we want to like talk commer…”
d’Sa: Voice AI Startups Must Eventually Move From Low-Code to Code
“But my personal opinion is that eventually you need to go to code. Eventually, if you have like 10 people that all come into a low code solution and through clicking some buttons, And getting a system prompt together, have like a viable product. Eventually tho…”
d'Sa: B2B telephony AI market is several times larger than ChatGPT Voice
“If you take all of those different pockets of use cases together, It's like several, several times bigger than like chat GPT voice mode. So yeah, open AI is like a big customer and like has a lot of traffic, but at the same time, like the pie is a lot bigger t…”
Russ d’Sa: Turning down Coinbase acquisition cost founders high eight figures
“And in the end, if you look at like Coinbase's stock performance and you look at the offers that my co-founder and me and three other people at the company got, it would have been like way more of a like, you know, like eight figures, higher eight figures deci…”
d'Sa: Public company tried acquiring LiveKit on its open-source release day
“Like the day that we put out the first release in open source, it wasn't a company. It was just me, DZ and our kind of who is now our first employee at the time, just, you know, a contributor that we knew from Evie, actually one of our old Evie employees. It w…”