LiveKit buys Loophole Labs to cut AI agent startup times below 3 seconds
What's the deal? LiveKit has acquired Loophole LabsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, an infrastructure startup whose technology will help LiveKit start AI agents faster and handle bursts of demand. The terms were undisclosed. Loophole Labs' entire eight-person engineering team joins LiveKit, with founder and chief executive officer Shivansh Vij continuing to lead them.
What's the endgame? LiveKit, based in San Francisco, is an end-to-end platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. It plans to move Loophole Labs' technology into production over the next several weeks, targeting agent startup times under three seconds.
Why does it matter? Faster startup lets LiveKit respond quicker to changing demand and cut costs, because agents no longer sit idle. The company says it moves closer to offering customers essentially unlimited concurrent agents.
What does Loophole bring? Founded in 2021, Loophole Labs has focused on application startup times and moving running workloads between servers and data centres. It built its own virtualisation technology, including a hypervisor called Substrate, that lets workloads move between machines with little to no disruption.
"Shiv and the Loophole Labs team have spent years tackling some of the hardest problems in virtualization," said Russ d'Sa, co-founder and chief executive officer of LiveKit. "Their technology fills an important gap for us as we work to become the default platform for building and running agents, including workloads that go beyond voice."
Why now? The deal follows a run of momentum for LiveKit, including a $100 million Series C in January 2026 at a $1 billion valuation. Its customers include Salesforce, Meta, Microsoft, Spotify, and 911 emergency services.
The signal: As AI agents move into production at scale, infrastructure speed and cost are becoming the battleground. LiveKit is buying the virtualisation know-how to defend its bid to be the default platform for running them.
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