Agora empowering app developers
Makes about 40 billion minutes of real-time human engagement per month worldwide across use cases
Hyderabad: Founded in 2014, US-based Agora, a video, voice and live interactive streaming platform is leveraging emerging technologies to provide the software development kits (SDKs) and building blocks to enable a real-time engagement platform. The company primarily serves app platforms, aggregators, and enterprises.
The company which went to IPO on Nasdaq last June makes about 40 billion minutes of real-time human engagement per month worldwide. Agora primarily caters to the B2B (business-to-business) space, catering to the needs of corporate/enterprises.
Agora is a Platform as a Service provider (PaaS) whose interactive voice, video, and messaging SDKs are embedded into mobile, web, and desktop applications. The company’s technology enables developers to build applications that meet end users’ needs at companies such as Bunch, New Oriental, Pragli, Talkspace, DrFirst, The Meet Group among others.
Steady performance
The company as of December 2020 has 2,095 customers worldwide up from 1,815 in September 2020 while its accumulated registered applications stood at 2,72,000 in December 2020, up from 2,45,000 in September 2020.
The company recorded revenues for the December 2020 quarter at $33.3 million, representing year-on-year growth of 74 per cent from $19.1 million in the same quarter of the previous year. The company’s total revenues for the financial year 2020 (January-December) stood at $133.6 million, up 107 per cent from $64.4 million in FY19.
Application-centric
Ranganath Jagannath, director, Growth, Agora, who heads India operations, told Telangana Today, “We believe it is very important to make sure that the app developers in the ecosystem are comfortable using Agora by removing all complexities. We also give 10,000 minutes per month free for life to any developer or app that uses the Agora network or SDKs. We are one of the very few networks with zero system-wide downtime. We have modularised the complete SDK and network at the product and operating system/architecture level.”
Ranganath Jagannath, director, Growth, Agora, heading India operations
The company aims to make real-time engagement ubiquitous, allowing everyone to interact with anyone, anytime, anywhere, and on any application.
“Our platforms help developers deliver rich in-app experience-including embedded voice and video chat, real-time recording, live streaming, and real-time in-app messaging-for users across gaming, social, education, team collaboration, virtual events, retail, entertainment, and enterprise apps across a variety of use cases across 100 countries,” he noted.
Use case trends
Jagannath observed, while the company saw the steepest growth in edutech and healthtech adoption in the initial months of the Covid outbreak, there was a whole set of segments that also quickly adopted real-time engagement platform of Agora such as gaming, e-sports, social media, OTT (over-the-top) and entertainment. Interestingly, within health tech/wellness, in addition to telemedicine, there was a significant uptake in the mental health and fitness space.
He added, “Agora is also seeing some niche use cases such as using virtual reality while catering to sports content. We realized that latency has been very important to make it more relevant. We are also seeing demand or need for immersive and virtual conferencing solutions, where Agora is being used. Be it classroom, hospital/clinic or shopping environment, we are seeing early usages in virtual, augmented and mixed reality.”
Agora is continuously doing a lot of research and development in the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning. On the audio front, for instance, the company believes a lot of artificial intelligence can be built into, on top of voice platforms in areas such as gaming.
In voice effects, the company has tried to bring adaptive noise cancellation and echo cancellation.
The company as part of its inorganic growth strategy has acquired Easemob, an instant messaging API (application programming interface) provider in China, and netless, an interactive whiteboard API provider, both complementing the company’s video and voice APIs.
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