Agora.

A video call that doesn't freeze is a small miracle

Somewhere right now, a student in a virtual classroom raises a hand. A patient joins a therapy session from a kitchen table. A shopper watches a host demo a product and taps "buy" mid-stream. None of them think about the network. That is the whole point. Agora built a business out of being the thing nobody notices - the real-time layer that carries voice, video, chat, and increasingly AI, between people and devices that may be on opposite sides of the planet.

Agora is a real-time engagement platform. Developers reach for its APIs and SDKs the way they reach for a payment processor or a maps widget: they want the hard part solved and the credit elsewhere. Today more than 1,700 organizations route their live experiences through Agora's network, and its software development kits sit on over 500 million devices. The company is public, trading on Nasdaq under a ticker that could not be more honest about what it sells: API.

Real-time is the part of the internet that fights back

Sending a file across the world is easy; the internet was built for it. Sending a live conversation is not. Packets arrive late, out of order, or not at all. A 200-millisecond delay turns a chat into an awkward dance of "no, you go ahead." For most of the web's history, building reliable live audio and video meant assembling codecs, servers, and network routing by hand - and then maintaining all of it forever.

The founders had watched this problem up close. The core team came out of WebEx, YY, and telecom hardware: people who already knew exactly where the lag hides. Their read of the market was simple. Developers did not want to become real-time networking experts. They wanted to add a video call to their app on a Tuesday and ship it on a Wednesday.

One engineer, one degree in radio electronics, one wager

Tony (Bin) Zhao founded Agora in 2013. His background reads like foreshadowing: a bachelor's degree in radio and electronics from Peking University, then years inside the companies that pioneered web conferencing. He had spent a career moving signals through unreliable channels. Agora was the bet that he could package that craft and sell it by the minute.

The structure was deliberately transpacific from day one. A Santa Clara headquarters chased the global developer market; a Shanghai base served a huge domestic one. It was an unusual shape for a startup, and it gave Agora something rare - a real-time network with teeth on both sides of the Pacific, where most of the world's live traffic actually wants to go.

A menu of hard problems, sold as easy buttons

What Agora sells is a catalog of things that are miserable to build and pleasant to consume. Each one is a separate SDK; together they cover most of what "live" means online.

The newest chapter is AI that talks back. In 2025 Agora launched its Conversational AI Engine and wired in OpenAI's Realtime API, letting speech be processed directly instead of bouncing through text. Then it went a step further and put the whole thing on a chip - the ConvoAI Device Kit - so a toy, a robot, or a smart-home gadget can hold a conversation without a phone in the room.

Numbers that survive a skeptic

Marketing claims are cheap; usage is not. The case for Agora rests on scale and on customers who put real stakes on the line. Talkspace runs mental-health teletherapy through Agora's voice and video. Robopoet's Fuzzoo, an AI companion robot, leans on the ConvoAI Device Kit for real-time emotional support. Live shopping platforms, virtual classrooms, and telehealth services all sit on the same plumbing.

The most flattering number is the smallest one - 610 people moving traffic for half a billion devices.

The financial story is more complicated, and Agora does not hide it. The 2020 IPO opened near a $5 billion valuation in a market that had fallen briefly in love with anything labeled "real-time." The public market cap has since contracted sharply. The business that powers all those live moments is still proving it can turn engagement into durable profit. That tension - massive usage, modest market cap - is the honest center of the Agora story.

Make presence feel real, everywhere

Strip away the SDK names and Agora's mission is almost old-fashioned: let people interact with the world as if they were physically present. Distance is the enemy; latency is its weapon. Every product the company ships is another few milliseconds shaved off the gap between "here" and "there."

What is new is who gets to be present. The conversational AI work means presence is no longer only human-to-human. A child can talk to a robot. A patient can talk to an assistant. The same network that carried your video call now carries a conversation with something that was never in the room at all.

Back to the kitchen table

Return to where we started. The student raising a hand. The patient on the therapy call. The shopper buying mid-stream. A decade ago, every one of those moments would have stuttered, dropped, or simply never been built - because the real-time problem was too expensive for most teams to solve alone.

Agora's quiet achievement is that those moments now feel ordinary. The lag is gone, so the technology disappears, so the human part is all that's left. That is the bet Tony Zhao made in 2013, and it is the same bet today - just with an AI now occasionally sitting at the table too. The company still has to prove the economics. But the experience it sells has already become the thing nobody thinks about. For infrastructure, that is the highest compliment there is.

See it move

Where to go next

Fun fact: the Nasdaq ticker is literally "API." A company that sells APIs, listed as API. Somewhere a branding consultant exhaled.