LiveKit for Startups: up to $23K for voice, video and physical AI teams

LiveKit for Startups went public in the directory today. LiveKit's own page puts the program at up to $23K in infrastructure and inference credits for early-stage teams where voice, video or physical AI is the core of the product.

LiveKit (Up to $23K in infrastructure and inference credits: one year of the Scale plan ($6,000), $10,000 additional Cloud credits and $7,000 in inference partner credits)

What the $23K is made of

Per LiveKit's startups page, the total has three parts:

• $6,000: one year of the Scale plan. Hosted agents, observability and telephony, with the $500/month fee waived.
• $10,000 in additional Cloud credits.
• $7,000 in inference credits. That is $1K with each participating inference partner: AssemblyAI, Deepgram, Fish Audio, Gemma, Gradium, Inworld and Rime.

The inference part only adds up to the full amount if you use all seven partners, so count the partners you would actually call when you estimate what the program is worth to you.

Who qualifies

LiveKit lists these requirements: fewer than 50 employees, under $5M raised and pre-Series A ($5M+ is reviewed case by case), a live website with a publicly identifiable founding team, and a product that is in production or launching within 6 months. Voice, video or physical AI has to be core to what you build, not a side feature.

How to claim

Apply with the "Apply now" button on LiveKit's startups page.

Other voice AI programs to apply to alongside it

LiveKit handles the realtime transport and agent hosting; most voice products also pay for speech-to-text and text-to-speech. These startup programs from the Voice AI pack are separate applications with their own rules. Values are each vendor's own wording, pulled from our dataset when the page is built.

• Deepgram (Up to $100,000 in credits over 12 months)
• AssemblyAI (12 months of recurring free credits + discounted startup pricing)
• Cartesia (12 months on Scale: 8M Sonic/Ink credits/month + $299/month Managed Agents credits)
• ElevenLabs (12 months free access: 33,000,000 characters (>$5,500 value))
• Gladia ($3,000 in credits for 12 months + a dedicated Field Developer Engineer ($3,500 if referred by a Gladia VC Partner))

Not ready to apply anywhere? These need no application, so you can prototype before you have a website or a launch date:

• Deepgram ($200 free credit, then pay-as-you-go)
• AssemblyAI (Free tier: up to 185 hours pre-recorded + 333 hours streaming, no card)
• Cartesia (Free plan: 20K credits/month)

Where to start

If you fit LiveKit's criteria, apply there first: it covers the realtime layer and includes credits with several speech vendors. Then apply to the speech programs you plan to use beyond those partner credits, for example Gladia's Startup Studio (fewer than 10 people, under 2 years since incorporation) or ElevenLabs' startup grant. While you wait for decisions, build on the free tiers above.

Voice ai pack

Originally published on Perq, where every listing carries a source link and a last-verified date. Perq is run by Avatar 8 LLC.