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Voice Agents Hit Infrastructure Scale as LiveKit Reaches $1B Valuation

Voice Agents Hit Infrastructure Scale as LiveKit Reaches $1B Valuation

Verified News & Announcements

O P
January 23, 2026

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Welcome back! OP here again, helping you with another addition of Agent Pulse - your go-to spot for agentic news, insights and more.

In today’s:

👉 TOP Agentic News
✨ Featured Agents
🎙️ What to Watch this Week
⚔️ Agent Arena Battleboard
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The Latest Agentic Development

PayPal to Acquire Cymbio to Scale “Agentic Commerce” for Merchants

PayPal announced an agreement to acquire Cymbio, a multi-channel commerce orchestration platform that helps brands sell across “agentic surfaces” (PayPal explicitly names Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity) while keeping the merchant as merchant-of-record. PayPal positions this as accelerating “Store Sync” so merchant catalogs become discoverable + orderable inside AI shopping flows—an important signal that agent-led discovery → cart → checkout is becoming a first-class payments battleground.

Elastic Ships Agent Builder GA (with MCP + A2A support) + Introduces “Workflows”

Elastic announced general availability of Agent Builder, framing it as a full stack for building secure, context-driven agents grounded in enterprise data on Elasticsearch—plus agent tooling/observability and a native conversational experience. Notable infrastructure signal: Elastic says Agent Builder has native support for MCP and A2A, and it introduced “Workflows” (tech preview) to add more deterministic, rules-based orchestration alongside LLM reasoning—aimed at moving agents from pilots to production.

LiveKit Raises $100M Series C at a $1B Valuation to Build the “Voice Agent Stack”

LiveKit announced a $100M Series C led by Index Ventures (with Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi, Altimeter, Redpoint), valuing the company at $1B, and framed 2026 as a breakout year for voice agents moving into production. Strategically, this is another major capital commitment to real-time, stateful “agent runtime” infrastructure (orchestration, deployment, observability) rather than just model access.

Thomson Reuters pushes agentic legal research to 200+ law schools

Thomson Reuters announced it is bringing its CoCounsel Legal agentic AI product to more than 200 law schools, giving around 120,000 U.S. law students access to agent‑driven legal research and workflow automation. By embedding Deep Research—an agentic capability that plans and executes multi‑step research grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law—into legal education, the company is seeding future practitioners with expectations that core analysis and drafting workflows will be agent‑orchestrated from day one.

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