Clubhouse Mania Drove $6 Billion to This Loss-Making Chinese Startup
- Agora, which powers audio chats, surged 150% since January
- Coding experts play down concerns about app’s security
Photographer: SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images
Clubhouse has in just two months become the venue of choice for luminaries like Elon Musk or Drake to expound on everything from telepathic monkeys to stock market valuations. But the real winner of the audio-chat app’s stratospheric rise is a loss-making Shanghai startup called Agora Inc.
Agora, known mostly within tech circles as an industrious but low-profile provider of software tools, has soared more than 150% since mid-January when online chatter began to circulate about how it powers the world’s hottest new social media forum. That’s because the little-known company -- now worth almost $10 billion -- provides developers with all they need to build real-time voice and video functions within applications: a template known as a software development kit.