LiveKit has acquired Loophole Labs, absorbing the New York-based team behind the Substrate hypervisor and the Architect Kubernetes availability platform to sharpen the runtime layer underneath its AI-agent stack, the two companies said on September 24, 2026.
Substrate becomes LiveKit's live-migration backbone
Financial terms of the all-team deal were not disclosed. Loophole founder and CEO Shivansh Vij and his engineers join LiveKit's infrastructure group, and their Substrate hypervisor — which lets long-running workloads live-migrate between machines with little-to-no disruption — will slot beneath LiveKit's agent runtime. That gives voice, video and physical AI agents a way to survive host failures, spot reclamations and cross-zone moves without dropping a session mid-conversation.
Why an agent platform buys a hypervisor
LiveKit powers agents at OpenAI, NVIDIA, Skydio, SpaceX and Salesforce, and cold-start latency on voice agents has become a competitive front. Co-founder and CEO Russ d'Sa framed the acquisition as vertical integration: owning the substrate under agents, not just the SDK on top, lets LiveKit shift long-lived sessions between machines the same way telcos hand off calls between cell towers. The move follows LiveKit's January $100M round at a $1B valuation and echoes the industry's rush to lock in dedicated compute for agentic workloads.
Loophole's Architect and AGX join the bundle
Beyond Substrate, LiveKit inherits Loophole's Architect platform for running Kubernetes pods on spot capacity and AGX, its sandbox for executing untrusted code inside AI agents. Both dovetail with LiveKit's push into physical AI, where robots and robotaxis need agents that can be paused, migrated and resumed as motors and sensors come online. LiveKit says existing Loophole customers will continue to be supported while the products fold into its cloud.
An AI-infrastructure M&A wave
The deal lands in a week where Qualcomm bought PickNik Robotics and Cognex closed its $500M RealSense buy, as platforms race to own the physical-AI stack end to end.
Reporting based on coverage from Fortune, The Neuron and Loophole Labs' company blog.