Apply to the
LiveKit Startup Program
Build and scale your voice, video, or physical AI startup with LiveKit. Qualified startups get infrastructure and inference credits to help move from early development to production.
Benefits
One year of Cloud Scale with the $500/month fee waived.
Additional Cloud credits on top of the Scale plan.
Inference credits for STT, LLM, TTS, and more coming.
Who qualifies
The program is built for net-new, early-stage startups building voice, video, and physical AI products. Review is fast and objective.
- Voice, video, or physical AI is core to your product
- Fewer than 50 employees
- Incorporated, or actively incorporating
- Live website and identifiable founding team
- In production, or launching within 6 months
- Building for real end-users
- Under $5M raised and pre–Series A ($5M+ reviewed case-by-case)
From application to activation
One simple application
Tell us about your team, your company, and what you’re building. Takes about five minutes.
Fast, objective approval
We review against the eligibility criteria. No lengthy back-and-forth, no pitch decks required.
LiveKit Scale plan + inference credits
Approved startups see their partner benefits and activate Cloud Scale to start building immediately.
FAQs
How do credits work, and what can I use them on?
You receive two kinds of credit, and they are not interchangeable.
LiveKit Cloud credits cover anything LiveKit Cloud bills for: agent session minutes, media and data transfer, telephony, and observability. Scale already includes a generous allotment of each, and those come free by default. The $10,000 is there for whatever you use beyond them.
Inference credits are separate, and apply only to the partner models they were granted for. Today that means Deepgram, Inworld, Rime, Fish Audio, AssemblyAI, and Gradium, plus Gemma 4 31B, the latency-optimized model we host ourselves. They all run through LiveKit Inference, so you reach them with the key you already have rather than a separate provider account.
A year of Cloud Scale comes with the program, and Scale carries discounted speech-to-text and text-to-speech rates. Your credits buy more minutes than the same balance would on Build or Ship, and your usage stays cheaper once they run out. LLM pricing, Gemma included, is the same on every plan.
How long do the credits last?
Credits expire 12 months from the date they are issued, or once they are fully consumed, whichever comes first. The 12 months run from issuance, not from when you first use them. Unused credits do not roll over.
Can we sign a BAA for healthcare and other regulated use cases?
Yes. BAAs are available to Scale and Enterprise customers handling protected health information, and the program includes a year of Cloud Scale, so approved startups can put one in place. See our security and compliance overview for the full list of certifications, and our data processing addendum for GDPR terms.
We’ve raised more than $5M. Can we still apply?
Yes. The cutoff is pre-Series A with under $5M raised, but we review applications above it case by case. Apply and tell us why you think it is a fit.
We already use LiveKit. Are we eligible?
The program is built for net-new startup projects, so teams on the free plan using LiveKit to evaluate or build are welcome to apply. We may decline projects that have been running on LiveKit for a while, or that are already paying or contractually committed customers. If that is you and you still think the program is a fit, apply and tell us why, and we will review it.
What happens after I apply?
We review every application against the eligibility criteria above. If you are approved, we email you a promo code. Enter it at checkout when you start your Cloud Scale plan, and the credits land on your project. A card on file is required to enroll.
Build with LiveKit
Apply to the Startup Program for infrastructure and inference credits to help get your product to production.