If you’ve joined a conversation on Clubhouse , attended a virtual event on RunTheWorld, or binged livestreams on Bilibili you’ve experienced Agora. It’s been sitting there, in the background, making sure the audio and video come through clearly.

Lilian's bear case:

Agora is an API-first business, which means it grows in two ways:

-Acquires new customers

-Agora is in a tricky spot, full of natural tensions:

-It wants to serve the broadest range of real-time engagement use cases well to appeal to the customers who need everything to just work, but faces competition from more geographically and use-case focused competitors.

-All of this is to say, livestreaming the technology is here, but livestreaming as a medium is not... Fundamentally what I’m pushing back on is saying that a technology will get adoption because it is big in China, when really we should be asking what made it catch on there in the first place.

Agora does a ton of engineering work and spends a ton of money on co-located data centers behind the scenes to make real-time audio and video just work. The result is that someone on WiFi in Ghana and another person on 4G LTE with spotty signal in Florida can sit in the same Clubhouse room with thousands of other people and hear the conversation... See more

-It wants to expand to the west, but hasn’t made the proactive PR push that Zoom has to appease westerners security concerns.