Bin "Tony" Zhao

In 1997, a young engineer from Peking University joined a small company in Silicon Valley called WebEx. His job: figure out how to make voice and video work reliably over the early internet. The infrastructure barely existed. The protocols were half-baked. Most engineers would have picked something easier. Bin Zhao picked this.

That instinct - to build what others consider too foundational, too unglamorous, too invisible - has defined every move of his career. When WebEx became synonymous with enterprise video conferencing before enterprise video was fashionable, Zhao was in the engine room. When JOYY became one of China's dominant live-streaming platforms with 300 million users, Zhao was CTO. When Clubhouse went viral in 2020 and everyone wanted to know how it scaled so fast, the answer was Agora - the company Zhao had been quietly building since 2013.

Infrastructure is destiny. Zhao understood this earlier than most.

Agora launched in 2013 with a deceptively simple pitch: why should every developer who wants to add voice or video to an app have to rebuild the same infrastructure from scratch? The answer, of course, is that they shouldn't. So Zhao packaged two decades of real-time communication expertise into SDKs that developers could drop into any application. A few lines of code and you had global, low-latency, high-definition audio and video.

The market rewarded that thesis. By June 2020, when Agora listed on Nasdaq under the ticker API (a deliberate choice - the ticker is the product description), the company raised $425 million at $20 per American Depositary Share. Zhao rang the Nasdaq opening bell. He had been building toward it for most of his professional life.

In early 2021, Clubhouse was the most talked-about app in tech. Drop-in audio rooms. Celebrities, founders, VCs talking live. Invites changing hands for hundreds of dollars. The question every journalist asked: how did it scale so fast?

Agora. Clubhouse had built on Agora's real-time audio infrastructure, which meant the hard part - low-latency audio delivery across dozens of simultaneous speakers and thousands of listeners worldwide - was already solved. Zhao's team had spent years making that invisible. When Clubhouse's user count exploded, Agora's stack simply absorbed it.

This is what good infrastructure companies do: they make the dramatic look unremarkable. It's unglamorous by design.

Zhao sees a direct parallel between 2013 and now. In 2013, developers needed someone to package real-time audio and video into accessible SDKs. In 2025, they need someone to package real-time AI voice into accessible infrastructure. Agora's Conversational AI Engine - launched in 2025 with OpenAI integration - is the same thesis applied to the next wave.

When MrBeast and Whatnot staged what became the largest live shopping stream in US history in 2026, with 583,000 concurrent viewers and infrastructure designed for 1.3 million, Agora's stack carried it. Thirty years after studying radio and electronics at Peking University, Zhao is still solving the same essential problem: how do you make real-time communication work at scale?

Zhao graduated from Peking University in 1992 with a degree in radio and electronics. The internet, as the world would come to know it, barely existed. He spent a few years finding his footing before landing at WebEx in 1997 as a founding engineer - one of the people who built the voice and video architecture that would later be acquired by Cisco for $3.2 billion.

After WebEx, he founded NeoTasks LLC, exploring what independent infrastructure building could look like. Then came JOYY - the Chinese live-streaming platform where, as CTO, he scaled systems to serve hundreds of millions of users during the early years of consumer live video. By the time he left to found Agora in 2013, he had seen the same problem from every angle: how voice and video travel reliably across the open internet.

Agora was not a pivot or an experiment. It was the conclusion of a very long argument.

The company achieved GAAP profitability in Q4 2024 - a milestone that mattered in a period when markets were demanding it from growth-stage tech companies. Annual revenues run at roughly $138 million. Zhao holds approximately 24% economic ownership with over 50% voting control through Class B shares - a structure that keeps the long-term thinking he's always applied intact regardless of quarterly pressure.

In Santa Clara, at the same address where much of the real-time internet was invented, Agora's 610 employees are now building the infrastructure layer for conversational AI. Zhao describes it in terms he's used for other inflection points in his career: the fundamental capability is being commoditized, which means the application layer is about to explode. He wants to supply the pipes again.