Agora Inc.

• Agora Inc.
• Technology

API

People increasingly use real-time video or voice to interact and engage with others online. Traditionally, such engagement happens as standalone experiences in dedicated communication applications. However, in more and more cases users are looking for contextual real-time video or voice engagement embedded in the application they are already using, rather than having to use another application for that functionality. For example, students in an education application want to see their classmates and work on a group assignment together; players in a poker application want to see each other’s faces to pick up on visual tells; users in a dating application want to see their potential partners as they get to know one another; and buyers in a shopping application want to talk to sellers. The potential opportunities for such contextual real-time video or voice engagement are only limited by one’s imagination.

However, for many application developers, real-time video and voice engagement functionalities are too difficult and expensive to build. Real-time video or voice engagement requires reliable multi-way transmission of large amounts of data between users at millisecond latency. The public internet, however, is an open and best effort network with no assurance of service quality. Network conditions vary across time of day, geographies and network operators, often causing significant data packet loss and high latency. Furthermore, hardware and software proliferation and fragmentation has exacerbated the challenge developers face in providing broadly compatible solutions.
We founded Agora to solve these problems.

We want to empower every developer—whether working as a solo entrepreneur or part of a larger organization—to leverage real-time engagement to create innovative products, elevate user experiences and differentiate themselves from competition.

We pioneered Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service, or RTE-PaaS, and we are the global leader by market share in this rapidly growing industry. Our platform provides developers simple-to-use, highly customizable and widely compatible application programming interfaces, or APIs, to embed real-time video and voice functionalities into their applications without the need to develop the technology or build the underlying infrastructure themselves. The real-time data transmission is handled by our Software-Defined Real-Time Network, or SD-RTN, which is a virtual network overlay on top of the public internet running on more than 200 co-located data centers worldwide. Using sophisticated algorithms, the SD-RTN continually monitors and optimizes data transmission paths through the network to minimize latency and packet loss, enabling high quality real-time engagement across millions of concurrent users.

Our business employs a freemium model, offering 10,000 free minutes of real-time engagement per month per account, to encourage adoption and innovation by developers and proliferation of real-time engagement use cases. As usage exceeds the allotted free minutes, we charge based on usage and developers become customers. In the month of March 2020 alone, we powered more than 40 billion minutes of real-time engagement for end users in more than 100 countries through more than 10,000 active applications. We define an active application as an application that uses one of our video or voice products for at least one minute in a given month. These applications cover a wide range of industries, including social, education, entertainment, gaming, e-commerce, financial services and healthcare. As of March 31, 2020, we had 1,176 active customers, which we define as customers who generate more than US$100 of revenue during the preceding 12 months. As our customers succeed, we share in their success through our usage-based revenue model. We believe a useful indicator of the increased activity from our customers is our Constant Currency Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate, which was 133% and 131% for 2018 and 2019, respectively. See the section of this prospectus captioned “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations—Key Operating and Financial Metrics—Constant Currency Dollar-Based Net Expansion Rate.” 
 

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