LiveKit, a San Francisco company that provides infrastructure for building voice, video and physical AI agents, said on September 24, 2026 that it had acquired Loophole Labs, a New York systems-infrastructure startup. The companies did not disclose the price or other terms.
All eight of Loophole Labs' engineers are joining LiveKit, and founder and chief executive Shivansh Vij will continue to lead the team inside the larger company. LiveKit said it expects to put Loophole's technology into production over the following several weeks.
The stated goal is to cut the time it takes to start an AI agent on LiveKit's platform to under three seconds. Faster starts would let LiveKit respond to sudden changes in demand, avoid paying for agents that sit idle waiting for work, and move closer to offering customers what it described as essentially unlimited concurrent agents.
What Loophole Labs built
Loophole Labs was founded in 2021 to work on two old problems in cloud computing: how long applications take to start, and how to move a running workload from one server or data centre to another without stopping it. To do that, the company wrote its own virtualization layer, including a hypervisor called Substrate that lets workloads run on and move between machines with little or no interruption, according to the announcement.
On its website Loophole describes two products. Architect is a Kubernetes platform that live-migrates running workloads across machines, availability zones and clouds before cheap spot instances are reclaimed, and that puts idle pods to sleep and wakes them in under 50 milliseconds. AGX is a sandbox platform for running untrusted code from AI agents on the company's in-house hypervisor.
The LiveKit announcement did not say what will happen to Architect or AGX customers. Commentary published by Beri after the deal noted that the release was silent on both products.
The company has described its approach as rethinking infrastructure from first principles to remove cold-start delays and to treat spot instances and GPUs as dependable compute.
“AI agents need to be able to start quickly and adapt as usage patterns change. Shiv and the Loophole Labs team have spent years tackling some of the hardest problems in virtualization. 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 LiveKit is buying
LiveKit describes itself as an end-to-end platform that gives developers what they need to build and scale voice, video and physical AI agents. Its customers include Salesforce, Meta, Microsoft, SpaceXAI, Spotify and 911 emergency services, according to the release.
For voice agents, start-up delay matters because the person on the other end of the call is waiting. Chief executive Russ d'Sa said in the announcement that agents need to start quickly and adapt as usage patterns change, and that Loophole's virtualization work fills a gap as LiveKit tries to become the default platform for building and running agents, including workloads beyond voice.
The two companies already knew each other. Vij said Loophole had worked closely with LiveKit over the year before the acquisition.
The founder and the funding
Vij began working on infrastructure in 2018 at IBM, where he focused on container and Kubernetes platforms and was involved in the early days of service meshes, according to Loophole's website. The site lists Amplify Partners, Cervin Ventures and Peak XV as the company's investors. Loophole has not publicly disclosed how much it raised.
LiveKit itself raised a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in January 2026, the company said in the acquisition announcement. LiveKit did not say whether it paid for Loophole in cash, stock or a mix.
Infrastructure for the agent market
LiveKit framed the deal around cost and capacity rather than new features. If agents can be started in seconds, the platform does not need to keep as many of them running in advance, which LiveKit said would cut operating costs. Loophole's existing work on moving live workloads between machines and waking idle ones in milliseconds addresses the same problem from the infrastructure side.
LiveKit has not said whether any of Loophole's technology will be released as open source, or whether Loophole's own customers will be moved onto LiveKit's platform.
