Agora

Real-time engagement (API)China

New to Unitard

📉 Public < $1B

Peak $5.01 BillionRecorded estimate

~-92%

from peak

🦄
Became a unicorn
2019
📈
Peak valuation
$5.01 Billion ’20
💔
Became a Unitard
2022
💸
Last valuation estimate
~$401M

Current status

Listed on Nasdaq (API)

The rise & fall

6 moments · 2019–2023

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2019

Joins the unicorn club

The real-time voice, video and chat API platform — the plumbing developers embed in their apps — crosses $1B ahead of its IPO.

Wikipedia

Jun 2020

The peak: a ~$5B Nasdaq debut$5.01B

Lists under the ticker 'API' at about $5.01B as real-time engagement surges in the pandemic.

Nasdaq

2021

The Clubhouse moment

Agora's audio infrastructure powers Clubhouse; the stock surges with the drop-in-audio craze.

CNBC

2021–22

The fad fades, the crackdown lands

Audio-social cools and China's edtech crackdown hits a key customer base; growth stalls.

Reuters

2022

Slips out of the club

Market cap sinks below $1B as growth stalls, eventually settling around $0.4B.

companiesmarketcap

2022–23

From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2022–23

Glassdoor reviews from the descent described a 2022 hiring spree reversing into successive layoff rounds — staff brought in on growth promises, then cut within months — and the wear of an operation split between China and the US: strategy churn and late-night calls across time zones.

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Agora provides a real-time engagement platform-as-a-service — voice, video, live-streaming and chat APIs that developers embed into their apps — and famously supplied the audio infrastructure behind Clubhouse. It listed on Nasdaq in June 2020 at about $5.01B and soared during the 2021 Clubhouse boom, but the audio-social fad faded, China's edtech crackdown hit a key customer base, and growth stalled; its market cap has since fallen to roughly $0.4B.

Source: stockanalysis / companiesmarketcap / Nasdaq (real-time voice/video API platform that powered Clubhouse; June 2020 Nasdaq IPO at ~$5.01B market cap, surged further during the 2021 Clubhouse boom; market cap ~$0.4B in 2025-26, well below $1B)

Founder

Bin Zhao
Founder, Chairman & CEO
Still there — Co-founder, CEOLinkedIn ↗

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-19. See our methodology.

Disclosed investors (11)

Historical funding participation; lists may be incomplete and do not establish current ownership or investor losses.

* Lead in a funding round · Crunchbase ↗ · 2026-10-13 · Methodology · Leaderboard