Clubhouse is scorching hot right now.
The invite-only social audio app — which lets users conduct real-time conversations or eavesdrop on celebrities and investors — is suddenly everywhere.
While the company is private, those looking to capitalize on its rise have been betting on Agora, a software firm that has seen its market value more than double, rising to $10B+, since the end of January.
Agora makes tools for ‘real-time engagement’
Founded in 2012, the company offers APIs (application programming interfaces) for real-time voice and audio features in only a few lines of code.
It went public last summer with the very relevant ticker $API.
According to investor Justin Caldbeck, Clubhouse was built in 1 week on Agora (Clubhouse does not speak publicly about its tech stack, but a recent Bloomberg article highlights that the connection does exist).
In recent months, Clubhouse has grown to 6m+ users, catalyzed by a Jan. 24 funding round (which valued the startup at $1B) and an appearance by Elon Musk during the GameStop/Robinhood controversy.
And with this growth, Agora has seen its stock price surge.
The tech isn’t just used by Clubhouse…
Per DFT Capital at Seeking Alpha, it powers several billion-dollar firms:
- Bilibi: A $53B Chinese social video-sharing app
- New Oriental Education: A $33B Chinese ed-tech firm
- Yalla: A $5.6B app called the “Clubhouse of the Middle East”
Agora charges on a per-usage basis, which means that the more often people use these services, the more cheddar $API makes (it projects $125-$130m for 2020).
Agora’s founder Tony Zhao is a veteran of WebEx…
… Cisco’s video-chat business that counts Eric Yuan (the founder and CEO of Zoom) among its alumni.
Agora is based in Shanghai — and some observers have raised questions about Clubhouse’s vulnerability to government surveillance. The app has already been blocked in China.
But elsewhere, the hype machine continues.Next up: a Clubhouse chat between 2 soft-spoken people Musk and Kanye West (and maybe Vladimir Putin, too).
