API

Interested in Agora, Inc. Sponsored ADR? Here are five stocks we like better. Agora’s Q2 results exceeded guidance: Revenue rose 18% year over year to $40.4 million, GAAP net income increased 50% to $2.2 million, and dollar-based net retention improved to 104% from 94% a year earlier. Conversational AI is becoming a key growth driver, particularly through voice-agent deployments in call centers, market research, financial services, gaming and debt collection. Agora expects AI to reach 5% of revenue on a fourth-quarter or annualized run-rate basis by the end of 2026, although scaling proofs of concept into production typically takes several months. Management expects continued growth but faces margin pressure: Q3 revenue guidance is $41 million to $42 million, while gross margin fell year over year because AI usage remains subscale. Agora held $361.7 million in cash and repurchased approximately 1 million ADS for $2.7 million during the quarter. Agora (NASDAQ:API) reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $40.4 million, up 18% from a year earlier and above the high end of its guidance range, as the company cited continued growth in its real-time engagement services and increasing adoption of conversational AI products. Founder, Chairman and CEO Tony Zhao said the quarter marked the company’s seventh consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. GAAP net income totaled $2.2 million, a 50% year-over-year increase, while the company recorded a GAAP operating loss of $1 million, narrowing from a $3.1 million loss in the prior-year period. → AST SpaceMobile Earnings Just Reminded Investors How Risky Space Can Be Chief Financial Officer Jingbo Wang said Agora’s dollar-based net retention rate improved to 104% from 94% in the second quarter of 2025, moving above 100%. The company expects third-quarter revenue of $41 million to $42 million, which would represent year-over-year growth of 15.8% to 18.6%. Zhao said Agora’s most significant progress during the quarter came from call-center deployments of voice AI agents. The company is seeing adoption of agents trained on sales and customer-service playbooks, which can handle outbound calling, lead qualification, information collection and meeting scheduling. → Nebius’ Q2 Beat Shows the AI Bottleneck Is Capacity, Not Demand According to Zhao, the agents are achieving conversion rates similar to those of human representatives in certain outbound marketing applications, while offering higher calling capacity and different unit economics. He also cited market-survey applications, where voice AI agents can conduct consumer and product-feedback interviews while collecting structured information. “We are beginning to see them match or even surpass human performance in an increasing number of tasks in achieving targeted business outcomes,” Zhao said. → On Holding's Price Stumble May Be an Opening for a Company Built to Run The company said its technology can compress large-scale market-survey work that would traditionally take days or weeks into hours because of its ability to handle a high volume of concurrent conversations. Agora is also working with customers on use cases including financial-services outreach, gaming user acquisition and retention, and debt collection. Management expects several customers to move from proof-of-concept projects to larger deployments in coming quarters. However, Wang said scaling an AI use case from an initial proof of concept to consistent production performance generally takes several months. Agora continues to target conversational AI representing 5% of revenue by the end of 2026 on a fourth-quarter or annualized run-rate basis. Wang noted that the contribution for the full year will be below 5% because the business is still ramping. He said the company has a “strong pipeline” that it expects to expand by year-end, leaving room for further growth in 2027. During the quarter, Agora introduced Agora Skills and Agora CLI, tools intended to help human developers and AI coding assistants build real-time engagement and conversational AI applications using the company’s software development kits and best practices. The company also announced a partnership with Gradient, a voice AI platform founded by the research team behind the Moshi and Hibiki speech models. Zhao said the integration enables developers to use Gradient text-to-speech through Agora’s Conversational AI Engine without additional latency hops. Zhao said Agora will continue investing in its software-defined real-time network, or SDRTN, which it views as a central advantage as it expands from human-to-human interactions into human-to-AI communications. He said smooth AI conversations require low-latency inference and transmission, making the company’s communications infrastructure increasingly important. On competition, Zhao said conversational AI includes agent, model and infrastructure layers. He identified Twilio as a company that can leverage telecommunications APIs and phone numbers from its communications-platform business, while Agora is focusing on voice models, audio preprocessing and postprocessing, low-latency cloud infrastructure and the agent layer. Zhao said Agora’s experience handling issues such as noise, echoes and packet loss can improve voice AI experiences. The company also expects to host its Intelligent Real-Time Engagement conference in Beijing on Oct. 23 and Oct. 24. Second-quarter gross profit rose 12.5% year over year to $25.7 million. Gross margin was 63.7%, compared with 66.8% a year earlier and 63.4% in the first quarter. Wang attributed the year-over-year decline primarily to product mix, as conversational AI usage increased while remaining at an early scale stage. The sequential improvement reflected technical optimization, he said. Research and development expense increased 10.2% to $15.4 million, driven by investment in conversational AI. Sales and marketing expense declined 1.5% to $6.4 million, while general and administrative expense fell 9.5% to $5.5 million. Wang attributed those decreases to expense discipline and improved customer credit and collection outcomes, respectively. Management’s goal is to reach quarterly GAAP operating profitability by the end of 2026. Wang said conversational AI gross margin is currently lower because the business is subscale and geographically dispersed, and because the company has prioritized experience improvements over cost optimization. Over time, management expects AI gross margin to become similar to or higher than Agora’s real-time engagement business margin. In China, Wang said demand from social, entertainment and education customers continued to recover amid a more stable operating environment. In U.S. and international markets, demand from live shopping, financial services and gaming use cases continued to grow. Operating cash flow was negative $2.1 million in the second quarter, compared with negative $0.4 million a year earlier. Agora ended the quarter with $361.7 million in cash equivalents, bank deposits and bank-issued financial products. The company said its cash balance declined mainly because of annual bonus payments and share repurchases. Agora repurchased about 1 million American depositary shares for approximately $2.7 million during the quarter. As of June 30, it had repurchased about 44.6 million ADS for approximately $159.9 million under its current authorization, with 83.8 million ADS outstanding. The repurchase program expires at the end of February 2027. During the question-and-answer session, Wang said Zhao’s separately announced plan to purchase an additional $20 million of shares had not yet begun because of blackout and legal restrictions. Zhao said the company was not considering taking Agora private and has not considered a special dividend at present. Agora, Inc operates a Real-Time Engagement (RTE) platform that enables developers to embed voice, video and interactive broadcasting capabilities into mobile and web applications. By providing a suite of software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs), the company delivers low-latency audio and video streaming, real-time messaging and live interactive streaming services. Its platform is designed to support high-quality interactions across various network environments, making it suitable for use cases in social media, online gaming, distance learning, telehealth and enterprise communication. The company's core offerings include voice and video calling SDKs, interactive broadcast SDKs for one-to-many streaming, real-time messaging services and data stream APIs for synchronized data exchange. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. The article "Agora Q2 Earnings Call Highlights" was originally published by MarketBeat. View MarketBeat's top stocks for August 2026.

This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Total Revenue: $40.4 million, up 18% year over year. GAAP Net Income: $2.2 million, up 50% year over year. Net Income Margin: 5.4%. Gross Profit: $25.7 million, up 12.5% year over year. Gross Margin: 63.7%, compared to 66.8% in the same period last year. Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate: 104%, compared to 94% in the second quarter of 2025. R&D Expenses: $15.4 million, up 10.2% year over year. Sales and Marketing Expenses: $6.4 million, down 1.5% year over year. General and Administrative Expenses: $5.5 million, down 9.5% year over year. GAAP Operating Loss: $1.0 million, compared to a loss of $3.1 million in the same period last year. Operating Cash Flow: Negative $2.1 million, compared to negative $0.4 million in the second quarter of 2025. Cash and Investments: $361.7 million in cash equivalents, bank deposits, and financial products issued by banks. Share Repurchase: Repurchased approximately 1 million ADS for approximately $2.7 million during the quarter. Third Quarter 2026 Revenue Guidance: Expected between $41 million and $42 million, representing year-over-year growth of 15.8% to 18.6%. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 10 Warning Signs with API. Is API fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Release Date: August 14, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Total revenue reached $40.4 million, up 18% year-over-year, marking the third consecutive quarter of accelerating growth. GAAP net profit increased 50% year-over-year to $2.2 million, with a net income margin of 5.4%. Dollar-based net retention rate improved to 104% from 94% in the prior year, indicating stronger customer retention and expansion. Conversational AI products are gaining traction, with voice AI agents matching or surpassing human performance in tasks like outbound marketing and surveys, leading to cost savings for customers. The company repurchased approximately 1 million ADSs for $2.7 million in Q2, and has returned about $160 million to shareholders, demonstrating a commitment to capital returns. Gross margin declined to 63.7% from 66.8% year-over-year, primarily due to the product mix shift toward subscale Conversational AI products. Operating cash flow was negative $2.1 million in Q2, compared to negative $0.4 million in the prior year, indicating weaker cash generation. The company still recorded a GAAP operating loss of $1 million, though improved from a $3.1 million loss last year. Conversational AI revenue contribution is still small, with a target of only 5% of revenue by the end of 2026, and gross margins for these products remain low due to subscale operations. The company faces intense competition in the Conversational AI market from players like Twilio, which could pressure market share and pricing. Q: How is the demand trend in overseas and domestic markets, and what are the key sectors driving growth? What are the other potential scenarios that could drive meaningful Conversational AI demand growth, and what will be the revenue contribution from Conversational AI by end of the year and the gross margin trend? A: Jingbo Wang (CFO) noted that on the RTE side, demand in China from social, entertainment, and education customers continues to recover, while in the US and international markets, demand from live shopping, financial services, and gaming use cases remains healthy. Tony Zhao (CEO) highlighted that in call centers, voice AI agents are matching or even surpassing human reps in certain tasks, marking the beginning of a long transition. Jingbo Wang added that call centers represent a collection of many use cases, from easy ones like outbound marketing and surveys to harder ones, creating a multi-year runway. The company is also expanding into companionship devices, with customer robots entering new markets like Japan. They are still targeting 5% revenue contribution from Conversational AI by the end of the year. Q: Could you please update on Conversational AI revenue progress and its projected contribution to full-year revenue? What is the conversion cycle for AI use cases, and how would you view the trend for AI revenue in the coming quarters? A: Jingbo Wang (CFO) explained that it takes several months for a use case to ramp from proof of concept to scale deployment. The company is targeting 5% revenue contribution by the end of the year, meaning the full-year 2026 contribution will be smaller. However, given the strong pipeline on hand, which is expected to grow, there is significant room for growth next year, and the company remains optimistic about the market outlook. Q: Have you given a long-term guidance (3-5 years) for the AI penetration rate of total revenue and gross margin? A: Tony Zhao (CEO) outlined that the call center market will split into three segments: simple tasks handled by NLP-based technology, the hardest tasks handled by humans, and everything in between handled by voice AI agents, which will be a significant portion of the market. Jingbo Wang (CFO) added that with nearly 20 million call center workers globally, even a small share of that market would be transformational. Regarding gross margin, the current low margin is due to subscale operations and a focus on experience over cost optimization. Once scale increases, they expect gross margin to be similar to, if not higher than, the RTE business. Q: Regarding the announcement to purchase an additional $20 million of shares, how much have you purchased to date, and what valuation do you believe reflects Agora's intrinsic value? Have you considered taking the company private or returning additional capital through a special dividend or accelerated buyback? A: Jingbo Wang (CFO) clarified that Tony Zhao has not started the $20 million repurchase due to blackout and legal restrictions, but will begin once cleared. The company has returned about $160 million to shareholders through buybacks, which is substantial relative to its market cap. They have not considered a special dividend at present. Tony Zhao (CEO) added that he does not plan to take the company private, preferring to stay in communication with the capital market and focus on business operations and technical advancement to create value for customers, shareholders, and employees. Q: What is the latest competitive landscape in the overseas market against major competitors? A: Tony Zhao (CEO) explained that Conversational AI has several technology layers, including the agent layer, model layer, and infrastructure layer. Different players attack from different angles; for example, Twilio leverages its strength in telecom APIs. Agora focuses on voice models, audio pre-processing and post-processing, low-latency cloud infrastructure, and the agent layer to deliver the best call experience. The company's extensive experience in audio processing, such as handling noise, echoes, and packet loss, gives it a competitive advantage in improving the Conversational AI experience. For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug. 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Agora, Inc. (NASDAQ: API) (the “Company”), a pioneer and leader in conversational AI and real-time engagement technology, today announced its unaudited financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2026. “We are pleased to report another quarter of accelerating growth, driven by strength across both our real-time engagement and conversational AI businesses, and our seventh consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability,” said Tony Zhao, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Agora, Inc. “Our voice AI agents are now deployed across an expanding set of use cases—including market surveying, buyer interest capture, and customer service—and we are beginning to see them match or even surpass human performance in an increasing number of tasks. We believe continued improvements in our AI agent solutions will unlock new demand and accelerate the industry shift toward AI-led call center workflows. Looking ahead, we will continue investing in our real-time infrastructure and developer ecosystem for both human-to-human and human-to-AI interactions, while maintaining strong financial discipline.” Second Quarter 2026 Highlights Total revenues for the quarter were $40.4 million, an increase of 18.0% from $34.3 million in the second quarter of 2025. Active Customers as of June 30, 2026 were 3,892, an increase of 0.4% from 3,877 as of June 30, 2025. Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate for the quarter was 104%, compared to 94% in the second quarter of 2025. Net income for the quarter was $2.2 million, compared to $1.5 million in the second quarter of 2025. Total cash, cash equivalents, bank deposits and financial products issued by banks as of June 30, 2026 was $361.7 million. Net cash used in operating activities for the quarter was $2.1 million, compared to $0.4 million in the second quarter of 2025. Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results RevenuesTotal revenues were $40.4 million in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 18.0% from $34.3 million in the same period last year, primarily due to the continued expansion of our real-time engagement service in sectors such as live shopping and financial service. Cost of RevenuesCost of revenues was $14.7 million in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 28.9% from $11.4 million in the same period last year, primarily due to increases in bandwidth and server costs and costs related to conversational AI products. Gross Profit and Gross MarginGross profit was $25.7 million in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 12.5% from $22.9 million in the same period last year. Gross margin was 63.7% in the second quarter of 2026, compared to 66.8% in the same period last year, mainly due to product mix changes, including conversational AI products remaining at a sub-scale stage. Operating ExpensesOperating expenses were $27.3 million in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 2.8% from $26.5 million in the same period last year. Research and development expenses were $15.4 million in the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 10.2% from $14.0 million in the same period last year, primarily due to increased investment in conversational AI products. Sales and marketing expenses were $6.4 million in the second quarter of 2026, a decrease of 1.5% from $6.5 million in the same period last year, primarily due to disciplined expense management. General and administrative expenses were $5.5 million in the second quarter of 2026, a decrease of 9.5% from $6.0 million in the same period last year, primarily due to a decrease in allowance for current expected credit losses, mainly because of improved customer credit conditions and collection outcomes. Loss from OperationsLoss from operations was $1.0 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to $3.1 million in the same period last year. Interest IncomeInterest income was $3.4 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to $3.7 million in the same period last year, primarily due to the decrease in the average principal amount. Investment (Loss) IncomeInvestment loss was $0.4 million in the second quarter of 2026, compared to investment income of $0.8 million in the same period last year, primarily due to fair value changes in equity investments. Net Income per American Depositary Share Attributable to Ordinary ShareholdersBasic and diluted net income per American Depositary Share (“ADS”) attributable to ordinary shareholders were $0.03 and $0.02, respectively, in the second quarter of 2026, compared to $0.02 and $0.01, respectively, in the same period last year.1 Share Repurchase Program During the three months ended June 30, 2026, the Company repurchased approximately 3.8 million of its Class A ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 1.0 million ADSs) for approximately US$3.7 million. As of June 30, 2026, the Company had repurchased approximately 178.5 million of its Class A ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 44.6 million ADSs) for approximately US$159.9 million under the current share repurchase program. As of June 30, 2026, the Company had 335.1 million ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 83.8 million ADSs) outstanding, compared to 449.8 million ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 112.4 million ADSs) as of the inception of the program. The current share repurchase program will expire at the end of February 2027. Financial Outlook Based on currently available information, the Company expects total revenues for the third quarter of 2026 to be between $41 million and $42 million, representing year-over-year growth of 15.8% to 18.6%. This outlook reflects the Company's current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. Earnings Call The Company will host a conference call to discuss the financial results at 6 p.m. Pacific Time / 9 p.m. Eastern Time on August 13, 2026. Details for the conference call are as follows:Event title: Agora, Inc. 2Q 2026 Financial ResultsThe call will be available at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/vbsrxuhvInvestors who want to hear the call should log on at least 15 minutes prior to the broadcast. Participants may register for the call with the link below.https://register-conf.media-server.com/register/BI5f0cd7b35b2145edaa88a91c662e14aaPlease visit the Company's investor relations website at https://investor.agora.io on August 13, 2026 to view the earnings release and accompanying slides prior to the conference call. Operating Metrics The Company also uses other operating metrics included in this press release and defined below to assess the performance of its business. Active Customers An active customer at the end of any period is defined as an organization or individual developer from which the Company generated more than $100 of revenue during the preceding 12 months, excluding customers from Easemob. Customers are counted based on unique customer account identifiers. Generally, one software application uses the same customer account identifier throughout its life cycle while one account may be used for multiple applications. Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate is calculated by comparing the quarterly revenue from paying customers, excluding revenue from certain end-of-sale products, in the quarter four quarters prior to the most recent quarter to the quarterly revenue from the same set of customers in the most recent quarter. The Company believes Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate facilitates operating performance comparisons on a period-to-period basis. Safe Harbor Statements This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical or current fact included in this press release are forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements regarding the Company's financial outlook, beliefs, and expectations. Forward-looking statements include statements containing words such as “expect,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “project,” “will,” and similar expressions intended to identify forward-looking statements. Among other things, the Financial Outlook in this announcement contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on the Company's current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties. The Company's actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of these risks and uncertainties, which include, without limitation, risks related to the growth of the RTE-PaaS market; the Company's ability to manage its growth and expand its operations; the Company's ability to attract new developers and convert them into customers; the Company's ability to retain existing customers and expand their usage of its platform and products; the Company's ability to drive popularity of existing use cases and enable new use cases, including through quality enhancements and introduction of new products, features, and functionalities; the Company's fluctuating operating results; competition; the effect of broader technological and market trends on the Company's business and prospects; general economic conditions and their impact on customer and end-user demand; and other risks and uncertainties included elsewhere in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including, without limitation, the Company's annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2025 and other filings with the SEC. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and the Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. About Agora, Inc. Agora, Inc. is the holding company of two independent divisions, under the Agora brand and the Shengwang brand, respectively. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Agora is a pioneer and global leader in conversational AI and Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), providing developers with simple, flexible, and powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs, to embed real-time conversational AI, video, voice, chat, and interactive streaming into their applications. Headquartered in Shanghai, China, Shengwang is a pioneer and leading conversational AI and Real-Time Engagement PaaS provider in the China market. For more information on Agora, please visit: www.agora.ioFor more information on Shengwang, please visit: www.shengwang.cn Agora, Inc.Consolidated Balance Sheets(Unaudited, in US$ thousands) Agora, Inc.Consolidated Statements of Comprehensive Income(Unaudited, in US$ thousands, except share and per share data) Agora, Inc.Consolidated Statements of Cash Flows(Unaudited, in US$ thousands) ___________________1 One ADS represents four Class A ordinary shares. CONTACT: Investor Contact: [email protected] Media Contact: [email protected]

This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Total Revenue: $37.7 million, up 13.5% year-over-year. GAAP Net Profit: $1.1 million, more than double the level of Q1 last year. Gross Profit: $23.9 million, a 5.7% year-over-year increase. Gross Margin: 63.4%, compared to 68% in the same period last year. R&D Expenses: $14.4 million, up 2.9% year-over-year, accounting for 38.1% of total revenues. Marketing Expenses: $5.9 million, down 4.8% year-over-year, representing 15.6% of total revenues. General and Administrative Expenses: $6 million, down 6.4% year-over-year, representing 15.9% of total revenues. Operating Cash Flow: $5.7 million, including interest received of $4.3 million. Cash and Equivalents: $366.1 million at the end of Q1. Share Repurchase: Approximately 12.5 million class A ordinary shares repurchased for $13.1 million. Guidance for Q2 2026 Revenue: Expected to be between $39 million and $40 million, representing year-over-year growth of 13.7% to 16.6%. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 7 Warning Signs with API. Is API fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Release Date: May 27, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Agora Inc (NASDAQ:API) reported its sixth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability, with a net profit of $1.1 million, more than double the level of Q1 last year. Total revenue for Q1 2026 reached $37.7 million, marking a 13.5% year-over-year increase, exceeding the high end of the company's guidance range. The company launched Agent Studio, a no-code environment for building voice AI agents, and introduced Conversational AI agents for both inbound and outbound use cases. Agora Inc (NASDAQ:API) strengthened its position in the enterprise collaboration market with the launch of the Intelligent Meeting Engine, which offers AI-powered capabilities and end-to-end encryption. The company entered a strategic partnership with NetEase Smart Enterprise, expanding its go-to-market opportunities across various sectors, including education and digital entertainment. Gross margin decreased to 63.4% from 68% in the same period last year, primarily due to the product mix change, especially with Conversational AI products at a subscale stage. Operating cash flow decreased significantly to $5.7 million in Q1 2026 from $17.6 million in Q1 2025. The company faced challenges in deploying voice AI in production environments due to the complexity of orchestrating multiple technology layers. Despite strong early validation, the revenue contribution from Conversational AI remains relatively low, with expectations to reach around 5% by the summer. The market for Conversational AI is still at an early stage, with significant competition, particularly in the US, and challenges in the Chinese market. Q: Can you provide insights into the growth trends in the overseas and China markets, and the verticals driving this growth? A: Both the China and US international businesses are growing rapidly, with the US market slightly outpacing China. In China, traditional verticals like social, entertainment, and education are recovering, while in the US, live shopping, financial services, and gaming are strong. Overall, Real-Time Engagement (RTE) demand is healthy. (Jingbo Wang, CFO) Q: What are the primary application scenarios for Conversational AI, and what revenue scale could be achieved by year-end? A: The primary applications are in call centers and IoT. Since launching our Conversational AI Engine, usage has grown over 150% sequentially each quarter. We expect call centers and IoT to be major revenue contributors, aiming for around 5% revenue contribution by summer. (Bin Zhao, CEO) Q: How is the e-commerce vertical, particularly overseas, developing, and what is its potential revenue contribution for 2026? A: Video-based live shopping is new in developed markets like the US. After a successful event with Whatnot, demand continues to grow, and we've acquired another e-commerce customer. This vertical has significant growth potential. (Jingbo Wang, CFO) Q: How is the domestic competitive landscape evolving, and what impact does it have on pricing power and revenue growth? A: The market is consolidating, with competitors focusing more on profitability than scale, which should aid revenue growth and margin improvement. Excluding Conversational AI, the core RTE business's gross margin remains stable. (Jingbo Wang, CFO) Q: What are the unit economics of Conversational AI, and how does it affect the target of turning operating margin-positive by Q4 2026? A: It's early to discuss unit economics, but as we scale and move from POC to deployment, we expect positive gross margins. Long-term, Conversational AI should generate similar or higher margins than current RTE products. Our goal of achieving operating profitability in the second half of the year remains unaffected. (Jingbo Wang, CFO) For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.

Image source: The Motley Fool. Tuesday, May 26, 2026 at 9 p.m. ET Chief Executive Officer — Bin Zhao Chief Financial Officer — Jingbo Wang Bin Zhao: Hi, Tony. Thank you, operator. And welcome everyone to our earnings call. I will start with a review of our, operating results for the quarter. I am pleased to report our 6th consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. Alongside another quarter of strong top line growth. Total revenue for the first quarter of 2 thousand 26 reached $37.7 million. Up 13.5% year over year. Growth further accelerating our prior quarters. GAAP net profit was $1.1 million. More than double the level of Q1 last year. These results reflect the continued expansion of our real time engagement use cases globally. As well as an increasing contribution from AI related applications and products built with our solutions. Now let me turn to our business. Product, and technology update for the quarter. Over the past several months, we continue to make progress in bringing conversational AI to real world production. Deepening the abilities with our real time engagement infrastructure and expanding our ecosystem partnerships. In March, we officially launched an agent series. A visual low code environment that enables developers and enterprise to rapidly build past and deploy with AI agents at scale. We also introduced conversational AI agents for inbound use cases such as customer service, as well as outbound use cases focused on sales and marketing. The market opportunity here is enormous. According to Gartner, Conversational Agents are expected to automate 70% of customer interactions. by 2027. And by 2028, AI agents are projected to outnumber human sellers. By 10-to-1. At the same time, many enterprises still struggle to deploy voice AI in production environments. The challenge is not simply AI model itself, but the complexity of integrating multiple technology layers. While maintaining low latency reliability, and the natural conversational experience at scale. In addition, effective enterprise deployment require domain specific expertise. A successful voice AI agent must do more than respond accurately It must reflect the tone. Personality, and workflow of the industry. It serves. For example, a car sales assistant a debt collection agent need very different conversational styles. Content scenarios, and customer engagement approaches. Our solution is designed to eliminate this complexity through a fully integrated stack that combines 3 core components. That allows enterprise to design, test, and deploy AI agents in minutes rather than weeks or months. Second, our conversational AI agent orchestrates ASR. Large laundry model, and TTS capabilities with intelligent inter interruption handling. Noise suppression, marketing role support, and domain-aware conversation design. Enabling more natural and human like interactions. Third, our global real time network infrastructure delivers sub second latency and carrier grade reliability worldwide. We are already seeing strong early validation. From real world deployments. In Q1, 1 customer implemented a story and pulling agent that matched 10% conversion rate of human agents. This allowed them to scale data collection and reward distribution far more cost effectively. Without adding operational headcount. Overall, enterprise feedback has been highly encouraging. Customers increasingly recognize that scalable conversational AI requires not only powerful models, but also real time infrastructures capability of delivering and seamless interaction. And integration. We believe we are uniquely positioned at the intersection of this capability. Last month, we also strengthened our position in the enterprise collaboration market with the launch of our intelligent meeting engine product. Intelligent meeting engine offers end to end encryption. Flexible employment options, including on premises and private cloud and a full data isolation to help ensure that customer meeting content remains entirely within their controlled influence infrastructure. At the same time, it increased AI power capabilities such as real time transcription, translation, intelligent meeting summaries, and automated follow-up workflows. That can connect with customers' existing business system. This solution addresses growing enterprise demand around the contents date, server net server netting, and intelligent workflow automation and has been well received in industries, including finance, government, and health care. Turning to ecosystem partnerships. We continue to integrate the native AI models such as Google's Gemini Live, and XAI's models into our conversational AI solutions. In particular, Google has featured Agora as a recommended partner for building real time conversational AI. Validating our technology leadership in this space. In addition, we recently entered into a strategic partnership with NetEase Enterprise Service Division. NetEase Smart Enterprise. Today, together, we will provide integrated solutions spanning real time video content moderation, and AI agent This partnership combines NetEase's expertise in AI and content moderation with our leadership in real time engagement infrastructure. We believe this partnership is meaningful validation of our technology from 1 of China's leading Internet companies. While also expanding our go to market opportunities across education, customer service, digital entertainment, and enterprise collaboration. Before I conclude, I want to thank that Agora and Shengwang teams for their continued dedication and execution. And thank our shareholders for their ongoing trust and support. Globally, Constitutional AI is rapidly moving from proof of concept to large scale deployment. Since the official launch of our conversational AI engine, product last year, usage has demonstrated remarkable momentum. With over 150% sequential growth every single quarter. And as I see it today, I am no longer asking whether they should adopt conversational AI. Instead, they are asking how to deploy it at scale with reliability, low latency, and seamless integration. We believe our decade of experience in real time engagement infrastructure uniquely position us to help customers solve exactly these challenges. With that, let me turn things over to Jingbo. Jingbo Wang: who will review our financial results. Thank you, Tony. Hello, everyone. Let me start by first reviewing financial results for the first quarter of 2026. Then I will discuss outlook for the second quarter. Operator: Starting this quarter, we have simplified our disclosure approach for revenues and active customers. And we will no longer separately disclose these metrics for Agora and Shunghwa. Jingbo Wang: We have also refined our dollar-based net retention rate, or DBNER, methodology, We now compare quarterly revenue from the same cohort of paying customers year over year to calculate DBNER. This change aligns DBNER more closely with our quarterly revenue growth rate making it easier for investors to compare the 2. Total revenue for the first quarter reached $37.7 million representing 13.5% year over year growth. Those results exceeded the high end of our guidance range of $36 million to $37 million and reflected continued expansion of usage growth of our real time engagement services in sectors such as US live shopping, social and entertainment, and financial services. DBNER for the first quarter was 99% compared with 95% in the first quarter of 2025. Gross profit for the first quarter was $23.9 million. Representing a 5.7% year over year increase. Gross margin was 63.4%. Compared to 68% in the same period last year. Mainly due to product mix change, especially conversational AI products. Remaining at a subscale stage. Turning to expenses. R&D expenses were $14.4 million. In Q1. Up 2.9% year over year. R&D expenses accounted for 38.1% of total revenues, compared to 42.1%. In the same period last year. The increase was primarily due to continued investment in conversational AI products Sales and marketing expenses were $5.9 million in Q1. Down 4.8% year over year. Sales and marketing expenses represented 15.6% of total revenues in the quarter. Compared to 18.7% in Q1 last year The decrease was primarily due to disciplined expense management including lower personnel and promotion expenses. General and administrative expenses Down 3.4% year over year. was $6 million in Q1. G&A expenses represented 15.9% of total revenues. Compared to 18.8% in Q1 last year. The decrease was primarily due to a lower allowance for current expected credit losses. Mainly as a result of improved customer credit conditions and collection outcomes. Turning to the bottom line. We delivered a GAAP net income of $1.1 million in Q1, more than double the GAAP net income in the first quarter last year. Representing a 2.9% net income margin This marks our 6th consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability and reflects continued improvement in our operating leverage. Now turning to cash flow. Operating cash flow. Including interest received was $5.7 million in Q1, was negative $4.3 million. Compared to $17.6 million in Q1 last year, which included interest received of $17.8 million. Moving on to balance sheet. We ended Q1 with $166 million. in cash, cash equivalents and deposits and financial products issued by banks. Net cash outflow in the quarter was mainly due to share repurchase. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 12.5 million Class B ordinary shares or 3.1 million ADS. Representing approximately 3.6% of our total outstanding shares. At the beginning of the quarter. For approximately $13.1 million. As of March 31, 2026. We have repurchased 174.7 million Class A ordinary shares. Or 43.7 million ADS. For approximately $156.2 million under our share repurchase program. Which represented 78.1% of a $200 million share repurchase program The current program will expire in February 2020. Now turning to guidance. Based on currently available information, we expect total revenues for the second quarter of 2026 to be between $39 million and $40 million compared to 34.3 million in the second quarter of 2025, representing year over year growth of 13.7% to 16.6%. Notably, even at the low end of this range, we expect to deliver faster revenue growth than we did in the first quarter. In closing, I want to thank our teams for their focused execution in the first quarter. We beat revenue guidance, and net income more than doubled year over year. Our second quarter outlook also points to a further acceleration in revenue growth. We will continue to invest in AI with discipline. And we are confident that it will become an increasingly important driver of long-term growth. Thank you all for joining today's call. Let's open it up for questions. Thank you. Operator: As a reminder, to ask a question, please press 11. On your telephone, and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press 11 again. First question comes from the line of Harry Zhao from Bank of America Securities. Please go ahead. Analyst (Harry Zhao): Hi. Management, for taking my questions, and congratulations on the strong first quarter and solid Q2 guidance. I have 3 questions here. The first 1, says the company, did not disclose the revenue breakdowns by region, so we would like to know the growth trend in overseas and China market. And what verticals are driving the growth behind. And secondly, in terms of the conversational AI, I would like to know the primary application scenarios at current stage and what revenue scale could the company achieve by the end of this year? And thirdly, it is about the appropriate guidance. What is the operating profit target for 2026 and any timeline for operating level breakeven? Thank you. Jingbo Wang: Thank you. On the first question, first of all, in this quarter, both the China business and The US international business are growing very rapidly. In terms of growth rate, the US business is still is still a little bit faster. and they are both approaching very healthy rates. So in terms of the demand, in both markets, I will talk about the demand in the RT market first. Tony will talk about demand in the AI market. So for RTE, in China, demand for the traditional vertical social entertainment education, most of those verticals' demand continue to recover. And in The US international markets, demand for live shopping financial services, and healthcare were among the strongest. And we have a pipeline of new customers in these verticals as well. So overall, RT demand looks quite healthy. Bin Zhao: About the demand on AI side, from the beginning of this year, we are closely watching the progress on our front. We were the first to introduce AI into the whole RT technology stack and offer the first generation of products empowered by those capabilities. Since then, we have been closely working with customers on practical demand. The thing is in the last few years, there has been a lot of hype around how AI can change people's life. And those claims are not fake, but many of those claims are overstatements that far ahead of what is happening on the ground. Most of it oversimplifies the practical challenges and actual adoption process. Since early last year, we have been seeing demand from call center education, digital, I think we talked about that last year. This is happening over the past few quarters in different regions. In each of those areas, we actually had certain partners and customers and worked with them to go into real production. With them, made progress in the overall experience, capital token economy, and customer use case adoption. At this moment, we see fairly large demand from the call center side. The technology of voice agent is increasingly able to communicate and resolve many communication tasks. Leveraging large language model intelligence is improving day by day. On IoT side, after successfully helping to launch the companion toy for Zuzu, Similar demand is expanding. Fuzuzu's growth itself is also very promising. It can get enough monthly subscription revenue from the most sticky user group every month. So it is not just 1 time sale of the hardware toy. Seeing a similar trend in other use cases of conversational AI. Jingbo Wang: So Tony just talk about the demand for conversational AI. So that is in So I will also answer partly the second question. So for revenue contribution this year, I would believe call center and IoT will be the biggest contributors And I think Tony has talked about that in his opening remarks that since we released our commercial AI, engine product, in March last year. Its usage has been growing at more than 150% sequential growth rate every single quarter. So also the revenue contribution at moment is still relatively low. We expect to see revenue to quickly ramp up and possibly in towards somewhere around 5% revenue contribution by year-end. So in terms of the 2026, operating target, given the current growth trajectory and the seasonality, we expect operating income and net income to both grow sequentially every quarter. From Q1 to Q4. And in terms of the GAAP net profit, we expect the GAAP net income will be significantly higher than last year. And our goal is to achieve GAAP operating profit. In the second half of this year. Thanks, Benjamin. Analyst (Harry Zhao): Very clear. Thank you. Thank you. Operator: Just a moment for our next question, please. Next, we have rate Rachel Han from CICC. Please go ahead. Rachel Hahn: Thanks. Hi. This is Ri Han, Rachel from CICC. Thanks for taking my questions, and congrats on another solid quarter. Especially with revenue coming above the high end of guidance. My first question is on e commerce overseas. Last quarter, I remember you highlighted whatnot and the Super Bowl live shopping event. So could you give us an update on how this vertical has been developing since then? And how should we think about the potential revenue contribution from overseas e commerce for the rest of 2026? My second question is domestic China business. I know we share some color on the growth drivers for the domestic business this year. But I noticed we announced net Ease smart enterprise partnership this quarter. So how should we think about its potential impact on our Sheng Wang's growth in 2026. Thank you. Jingbo Wang: Sure. First question, commerce use case. So I wanna say that in The US market and in probably all developed markets in general, video based live shopping is still a very nascent. We mentioned Whatnot last quarter. So after that event, very successful event, actually, the it did not turn off their user acquisition and customer user stickiness So we continue to see growing demand from that customer. In addition, we recently won another fast-growing video based e commerce customer. In US market from a competitor. And on top of that, we in the last quarter, it was a masterclass for the industry. So now everybody in the industry is watching. And several other players are trying to host similar events in the future. We are discussing with a few of them. Already. So we do expect this vertical to have long-run growth. And we are making solid progress. On that front. So in terms of the business in China, as I said, earlier, demand from these main internet-based use cases, social entertainment, education, we see steady demand recovery. Also, still at a moderate rate. And also, from verticals such as IoT, cameras, doorbells, cars, and some other wearable devices. The demand for our technology is growing very fast. It has been very fast in the past 2-3 years. And also digital transformation customers with additional AI features. We also see renewed demand growth from digital transformation. Traditional enterprise customers, In terms of the partnership, I think it is certainly very helpful in and of itself, but also it reflects the reflects a further consolidation of the RT market in China. Right? So recently, To just give some more examples, 1 of these recently? a cloud competitor in this market? Repurchased all of its venture capital investors and started to force more profitability rather than scale. Right? And that used to be a competitor, is now our largest partner And we also see another large private cloud vendor has. As further reduced its staff on the RTE business. So we do believe this kind of easing competition, this trend of consolidation will gradually help our revenue growth. As well. Okay. Thanks, that is very helpful, and hope all the best. Thank you. Rachel Hahn: Thanks. Operator: Thank you. Just a moment with our next question, please. Last question comes from Yu from China Securities. Please go ahead. Analyst (Yu Xing): Hi, management. Good. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on the strong And just 2 quick ones. First, are we seeing an improvement in domestic competitive landscape? And how should that translate into pricing power and revenue growth? Also, excluding the initial gross margin drag from conversational AI, What is what is the underlying gross margin trend for our core business? Second question, as the conversational AI business's cost is part hardware. it is unique economic spending. if AI progress comes in below expectation, how should we think about our target of turning operating profit margin positive? By Q4 of 2 thousand 26. Jingbo Wang: Sure. So first question, I am competition and the margins. So I will talk about RT and Tony will talk about So I think I just talked about let me think about the competition in the China market. We see that the market is moving toward further consolidation. That was more players who no longer come after scale. Right? So we do believe that will help with revenue growth as well as margin improvement in the coming quarters. So as you can see, overall, the gross margin in this quarter was lower compared to the same quarter last year. But that is mostly due to the initial negative gross margin of the conversational AI business. Is excluding conversational AI. Gross margin, of the core RTE business has remained actually relatively stable in the first quarter. Bin Zhao: And on the AI side, there is a lot of competition. For conversational AI in Silicon Valley and US market. Market is still at early stage. And there are different players trying to attack it. From quite diverse angles. Because it is still a growth market. So every company has a chance to win from different angles and still making progresses. We are the ones who focus more on the fundamental technology, trying to enable the most promising use cases through the ultimate quality of conversation. The customer demand is strong. As we see, the status is actually adapting those customer demands and improving the conversational quality so that it can resolve communication tasks. At a higher and better level making it more effective. China market is quite different. As you can see, most of the AI companies can only make a fraction of revenue in China market compared to their peers. The market is quite hard to get into at this moment. However, there is similar demand on conversational AI side. And the technology and product progress are also similar. Okay. So yeah. Jingbo Wang: So in terms of the unit economics of the conversational AI product, I think it is still too early to talk about for example, in first quarter, the reason we have a negative gross margin for this product is because we have a lot of POC customers. A lot of experimentation. That has generated no revenue but a lot of cost. So we believe as we continue to scale as customers, move from POC to deployment, and scale usage by the end of the year, we expect to see meaningful revenue contribution. And at that point, the gross margin goal certainly in turn positive and also be at a healthy level. In the longer term, we actually expect the conversational AI business to generate similar, if not higher gross margin than the current RT products. because of, 1, higher pricing, and 2, the more technical differentiation and value creation for customers. Oh, as to the question about if the AI progress is expectation. But we actually, we have considered all the investments we need to make on that front. And it will not affect our goal of achieving profitability in the second half of the of this year. Analyst (Yu Xing): Thank you. Operator: Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Thank you. With that, this concludes today's Q&A session and conference call. Thank you again, everyone, for attending the company's call today. As a reminder, the recording and the earning release will be available on the company's website at investor.agora.io And if there is any further questions, please feel free to email the company. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Before you buy stock in Agora, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Agora wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $477,813!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $1,320,088!* Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 986% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 208% for the S&P 500. Don't miss the latest top 10 list, available with Stock Advisor, and join an investing community built by individual investors for individual investors. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 26, 2026. This article is a transcript of this conference call produced for The Motley Fool. While we strive for our Foolish Best, there may be errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in this transcript. As with all our articles, The Motley Fool does not assume any responsibility for your use of this content, and we strongly encourage you to do your own research, including listening to the call yourself and reading the company's SEC filings. Please see our Terms and Conditions for additional details, including our Obligatory Capitalized Disclaimers of Liability. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Agora (API) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript was originally published by The Motley Fool

Interested in Agora, Inc. Sponsored ADR? Here are five stocks we like better. Agora beat first-quarter guidance, reporting revenue of $37.7 million, up 13.5% year over year, and its sixth straight quarter of GAAP profitability with net income of $1.1 million. The company also said revenue growth was driven by stronger real-time engagement usage across live shopping, social entertainment and financial services. Conversational AI is gaining momentum, with usage of Agora’s AI engine growing more than 150% sequentially each quarter since launch. Management expects the product to become a bigger revenue contributor this year as customers move from proof-of-concept to production deployments. Second-quarter outlook calls for faster growth, with revenue guided to $39 million to $40 million, implying year-over-year growth of 13.7% to 16.6%. Agora also said it aims to reach GAAP operating profit in the second half of 2026 while continuing disciplined AI investment. Agora (NASDAQ:API) reported first-quarter 2026 revenue above its guidance range and posted its sixth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability, as management pointed to continued growth in real-time engagement services and rising demand for conversational AI products. Founder, Chairman and CEO Tony Zhao said total revenue for the quarter reached $37.7 million, up 13.5% from a year earlier. GAAP net profit was $1.1 million, more than double the level from the first quarter of 2025. Zhao said the results reflected “continued expansion” of real-time engagement use cases globally and a growing contribution from AI-related applications built with Agora’s solutions. → Voya Financial Grows Earnings Across All 3 Business Segments CFO Jingbo Wang said revenue exceeded the company’s guidance range of $36 million to $37 million. He attributed the performance to usage growth in real-time engagement services across areas including U.S. live shopping, social and entertainment, and financial services. Wang said Agora’s dollar-based net expansion rate, or DBAR, was 99% in the first quarter, compared with 95% in the prior-year period. The company also changed its disclosure approach beginning this quarter, saying it will no longer separately report revenue and active customer metrics for Agora and Shengwang. Wang said the DBAR methodology was refined to compare quarterly revenue from the same cohort of paying customers year over year. → SpaceX Gets the Attention, But These 4 Stocks Could Get the Returns Gross profit was $23.9 million, up 5.7% year over year, while gross margin fell to 63.4% from 68% a year earlier. Wang said the decline was mainly due to product mix changes, particularly conversational AI products that remain at a subscale stage. Operating expenses were mixed. Research and development expense rose 2.9% to $14.4 million, driven by continued investment in conversational AI. Sales and marketing expense declined 4.8% to $5.9 million, while general and administrative expense fell 6.4% to $6 million. Wang said the G&A decline was mainly due to lower allowances for expected credit losses, reflecting improved customer credit conditions and collections. → Ross Stores Earnings Beat Sends Stock To New Highs Agora generated $5.7 million in operating cash flow in the quarter, including $4.3 million of interest received. The company ended the quarter with $366.1 million in cash equivalents, deposits and bank-issued financial products. The company also continued to repurchase shares. Wang said Agora bought back approximately 12.5 million Class A ordinary shares, or 3.1 million American depositary shares, during the quarter for about $13.1 million. As of March 31, the company had repurchased 174.7 million Class A ordinary shares, or 74.7 million ADS, for approximately $156.2 million under its $200 million repurchase program, which expires at the end of February 2027. Zhao highlighted Agora’s March launch of Agent Studio, a visual no-code environment designed to help developers and enterprises build, test and deploy voice AI agents. The company also introduced conversational AI agents for inbound use cases such as customer service and outbound use cases focused on sales and marketing. Zhao said many enterprises still face challenges deploying voice AI in production, citing the complexity of coordinating automatic speech recognition, large language models, text-to-speech systems and real-time infrastructure while maintaining low latency and reliability. He said Agora’s solution combines agent design tools, AI orchestration and its global real-time network infrastructure. As an example of early deployment, Zhao said one customer implemented a survey and polling agent in the first quarter that matched 10% of the conversion rate of human agents, enabling the customer to scale data collection and reward distribution without adding operational headcount. In the question-and-answer session, Wang said conversational AI usage has grown by more than 150% sequentially every quarter since the company launched its Conversational AI Engine product in March of last year. He said call centers and Internet of Things applications are expected to be the largest contributors to conversational AI revenue this year, and the company expects conversational AI to contribute around 5% of revenue “towards the summer.” Wang said the product currently has a negative gross margin because of proof-of-concept customers and experimentation that generate little revenue but create costs. He said management expects gross margin for the product to turn positive as customers move from proof of concept to deployment and scale usage, and said the long-term gross margin could be similar to or higher than the company’s current real-time engagement products. Zhao also discussed the launch of Agora’s Intelligent Meeting Engine, which offers end-to-end encryption, deployment options including on-premises and private cloud, and tools intended to keep meeting content within a customer’s controlled infrastructure. The product includes AI-powered functions such as real-time transcription, translation, intelligent meeting summaries and automated follow-up workflows that can connect with customers’ existing business systems. Zhao said the product has been well received in industries including finance, government and healthcare. Agora also continued to expand AI ecosystem partnerships. Zhao said the company has integrated models such as Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok into its conversational AI solutions, and that Google has featured Agora as a recommended partner for building real-time conversational AI. The company also announced a strategic partnership with NetEase Smart Enterprise, the enterprise services division of NetEase. Zhao said the partnership will combine Agora’s real-time engagement infrastructure with NetEase’s AI and content moderation expertise to deliver integrated solutions across areas including real-time video, content moderation and AI agents. During the Q&A session, Wang said both Agora’s China business and its U.S. and international business are growing rapidly, with the U.S. business still growing somewhat faster. In China, he said demand from traditional verticals such as social, entertainment and education continued to recover. Internationally, he cited live shopping, financial services and gaming as among the strongest areas of demand. Wang said video-based live shopping remains new in the U.S. and developed markets, but Agora continues to see growing demand from a customer that hosted a successful event highlighted in the prior quarter. He also said Agora recently won another fast-growing U.S. video-based e-commerce customer from a competitor. In China, Wang said demand is growing quickly in IoT categories such as cameras, doorbells, cars and wearable devices. He also said the domestic competitive environment is showing further consolidation, with some competitors shifting away from scale and toward profitability or reducing staff in real-time engagement operations. Wang said this trend could gradually support Agora’s revenue growth and margins. Agora guided for second-quarter 2026 revenue of $39 million to $40 million, compared with $34.3 million in the second quarter of 2025. That implies year-over-year growth of 13.7% to 16.6%. Wang said that even at the low end of the range, Agora expects faster revenue growth than it delivered in the first quarter. He also said the company expects operating income and net income to grow sequentially each quarter from the first quarter through the fourth quarter, with GAAP net income significantly higher than last year. Management’s goal is to achieve GAAP operating profit in the second half of 2026. “We will continue to invest in AI with discipline, and we are confident that it will become an increasingly important driver of long-term growth,” Wang said. Agora, Inc operates a Real-Time Engagement (RTE) platform that enables developers to embed voice, video and interactive broadcasting capabilities into mobile and web applications. By providing a suite of software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs), the company delivers low-latency audio and video streaming, real-time messaging and live interactive streaming services. Its platform is designed to support high-quality interactions across various network environments, making it suitable for use cases in social media, online gaming, distance learning, telehealth and enterprise communication. The company's core offerings include voice and video calling SDKs, interactive broadcast SDKs for one-to-many streaming, real-time messaging services and data stream APIs for synchronized data exchange. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. The article "Agora Q1 Earnings Call Highlights" was originally published by MarketBeat. View MarketBeat's top stocks for May 2026.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 26, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Agora, Inc. (NASDAQ: API) (the “Company”), a pioneer and leader in conversational AI and real-time engagement technology, today announced its unaudited financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2026. “We are pleased to report another quarter of accelerating growth and our sixth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability,” said Tony Zhao, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Agora, Inc. “During the quarter, we enhanced our conversational AI portfolio with the launch of Agent Studio, a no-code platform that enables customers to rapidly build, deploy, and scale voice AI agents, alongside purpose-built agent templates for customer service and outbound marketing. We are seeing robust customer adoption and sustained growth in platform usage. As the market shifts from pilot programs to full-scale production, our decade-long investment in real-time engagement infrastructure positions us as a trusted provider of reliable, high-performance solutions. We remain committed to enabling our customers to deploy conversational AI at scale with ease and confidence.” First Quarter 2026 Highlights Total revenues for the quarter were $37.7 million, an increase of 13.5% from $33.3 million in the first quarter of 2025. Active Customers as of March 31, 2026 were 3,946, an increase of 3.8% from 3,800 as of March 31, 2025. Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate for the quarter was 99%, compared to 95% in the first quarter of 2025. Net income for the quarter was $1.1 million, compared to $0.4 million in the first quarter of 2025. Total cash, cash equivalents, bank deposits and financial products issued by banks as of March 31, 2026 was $366.1 million. Net cash provided by operating activities for the quarter was $5.7 million (including interest received of $4.6 million), compared to $17.6 million in the first quarter of 2025 (including interest received of $17.8 million). First Quarter 2026 Financial Results RevenuesTotal revenues were $37.7 million in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 13.5% from $33.3 million in the same period last year, primarily due to the expansion and usage growth of our real-time engagement service in sectors such as live shopping, social and entertainment, and financial service. Cost of RevenuesCost of revenues was $13.8 million in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 29.9% from $10.6 million in the same period last year, primarily due to increases in bandwidth and server costs and costs related to conversational AI products. Gross Profit and Gross MarginGross profit was $23.9 million in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 5.7% from $22.6 million in the same period last year. Gross margin was 63.4% in the first quarter of 2026, a decrease of 4.6% from 68.0% in the same period last year, mainly due to product mix changes, including conversational AI products remaining at a sub-scale stage. Operating ExpensesOperating expenses were $26.4 million in the first quarter of 2026, a decrease of 0.4% from $26.5 million in the same period last year. Research and development expenses were $14.4 million in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 2.9% from $14.0 million in the same period last year, primarily due to increased investment in conversational AI products. Sales and marketing expenses were $5.9 million in the first quarter of 2026, a decrease of 4.8% from $6.2 million in the same period last year, primarily due to disciplined expense management, including lower personnel and promotion expenses. General and administrative expenses were $6.0 million in the first quarter of 2026, a decrease of 3.4% from $6.2 million in the same period last year, primarily due to a decrease in allowance for current expected credit losses, mainly as a result of improved customer credit conditions and collection outcomes. Loss from OperationsLoss from operations was $1.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, compared to $3.7 million in the same period last year. Interest IncomeInterest income was $3.4 million in the first quarter of 2026, compared to $3.6 million in the same period last year, primarily due to the decrease in the average principal amount. Investment (Loss) IncomeInvestment loss was $0.9 million in the first quarter of 2026, compared to investment income of $0.7 million in the same period last year, primarily due to fair value changes in equity investments. Net Income per American Depositary Share Attributable to Ordinary ShareholdersBasic and diluted net income per American Depositary Share (“ADS”)1 attributable to ordinary shareholders was $0.01 in the first quarter of 2026, compared to $0.004 in the same period last year. Share Repurchase Program During the three months ended March 31, 2026, the Company repurchased approximately 12.5 million of its Class A ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 3.1 million ADSs) for approximately US$13.1 million under its share repurchase program, representing 6.5% of its US$200 million share repurchase program. As of March 31, 2026, the Company had repurchased approximately 174.7 million of its Class A ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 43.7 million ADSs) for approximately US$156.2 million under its share repurchase program, representing 78.1% of its US$200 million share repurchase program. As of March 31, 2026, the Company had 338.2 million ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 84.5 million ADSs) outstanding, compared to 449.8 million ordinary shares (equivalent to approximately 112.5 million ADSs) outstanding as of January 31, 2022 before the share repurchase program commenced. The current share repurchase program will expire at the end of February 2027. Financial Outlook Based on currently available information, the Company expects total revenues for the second quarter of 2026 to be between $39.0 million and $40.0 million, representing year-over-year growth of 13.7% to 16.6%. This outlook reflects the Company's current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change. Earnings Call The Company will host a conference call to discuss the financial results at 6 p.m. Pacific Time / 9 p.m. Eastern Time on May 26, 2026. Details for the conference call are as follows:Event title: Agora, Inc. 1Q 2026 Financial ResultsThe call will be available at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/vbsrxuhvInvestors who want to hear the call should log on at least 15 minutes prior to the broadcast. Participants may register for the call with the link below.https://register-conf.media-server.com/register/BIdac26bffc0104a0da1dfcd94c16d1908Please visit the Company's investor relations website at https://investor.agora.io on May 26, 2026 to view the earnings release and accompanying slides prior to the conference call. Operating Metrics The Company also uses other operating metrics included in this press release and defined below to assess the performance of its business. Active Customers An active customer at the end of any period is defined as an organization or individual developer from which the Company generated more than $100 of revenue during the preceding 12 months, excluding customers from Easemob. Customers are counted based on unique customer account identifiers. Generally, one software application uses the same customer account identifier throughout its life cycle while one account may be used for multiple applications. Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate is calculated by comparing the quarterly revenue from paying customers, excluding revenue from certain end-of-sale products, in the quarter four quarters prior to the most recent quarter to the quarterly revenue from the same set of customers in the most recent quarter. The Company believes Dollar-Based Net Retention Rate facilitates operating performance comparisons on a period-to-period basis. Safe Harbor Statements This press release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements other than statements of historical or current fact included in this press release are forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements regarding the Company's financial outlook, beliefs, and expectations. Forward-looking statements include statements containing words such as “expect,” “anticipate,” “believe,” “project,” “will,” and similar expressions intended to identify forward-looking statements. Among other things, the Financial Outlook in this announcement contains forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are based on the Company's current expectations and involve risks and uncertainties. The Company's actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking statements as a result of these risks and uncertainties, which include, without limitation, risks related to the growth of the RTE-PaaS market; the Company's ability to manage its growth and expand its operations; the Company's ability to attract new developers and convert them into customers; the Company's ability to retain existing customers and expand their usage of its platform and products; the Company's ability to drive popularity of existing use cases and enable new use cases, including through quality enhancements and introduction of new products, features, and functionalities; the Company's fluctuating operating results; competition; the effect of broader technological and market trends on the Company's business and prospects; general economic conditions and their impact on customer and end-user demand; and other risks and uncertainties included elsewhere in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including, without limitation, the Company's annual report on Form 20-F for the year ended December 31, 2025 and other filings with the SEC. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement, and the Company undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. About Agora, Inc. Agora, Inc. is the holding company of two independent divisions, under the Agora brand and the Shengwang brand, respectively. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Agora is a pioneer and global leader in conversational AI and Real-Time Engagement Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), providing developers with simple, flexible, and powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs, to embed real-time conversational AI, video, voice, chat, and interactive streaming into their applications. Headquartered in Shanghai, China, Shengwang is a pioneer and leading conversational AI and Real-Time Engagement PaaS provider in the China market. For more information on Agora, please visit: www.agora.ioFor more information on Shengwang, please visit: www.shengwang.cn __________________________ 1 One ADS represents four Class A ordinary shares. CONTACT: Investor Contact: [email protected] Media Contact: [email protected]

This article first appeared on GuruFocus. Release Date: March 03, 2026 For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript. Agora Inc (NASDAQ:API) reported its fifth consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability in Q4 2025, marking the first full year of GAAP profitability since 2018. Total revenue for the fourth quarter was $38.2 million, representing a 10.7% year-over-year growth. The company successfully delivered high-quality video to nearly 600,000 peak concurrent viewers during a high-profile live streaming event, demonstrating its platform's scalability and reliability. Agora Inc (NASDAQ:API) is witnessing rapid adoption of its conversational AI engine product, with usage more than doubling each quarter since its launch. The company has a strong cash position, ending Q4 with $374.9 million in cash equivalents, bank deposits, and financial products issued by banks. Gross margin for the first quarter was 65.1%, down 1.5 percentage points year-over-year, primarily due to the lower margin profile of conversational AI-related products. The revenue contribution from conversational AI is still relatively low as many customers are in the proof-of-concept stage. The company faces competitive pressure in the real-time engagement market, particularly in China. There is a slight decline in research and development expenses, reflecting cost discipline but potentially impacting future innovation. The company anticipates flat gross margins in 2026 compared to Q4 2025, indicating potential challenges in improving profitability. Warning! GuruFocus has detected 8 Warning Signs with API. Is API fairly valued? Test your thesis with our free DCF calculator. Q: Could you update us on the overall real-time engagement (RTE) demand trend in China and overseas, and what industries are the key demand drivers? Also, could you share more about the conversational AI applications and their revenue targets? A: In China, demand from social entertainment and education sectors continues to grow, with significant potential in IoT and digital transformation. Internationally, our success in large-scale live streaming events has strengthened our position in live shopping. For conversational AI, we expect revenue to grow, with applications in companionship toys and physical AI equipment. We aim for conversational AI to contribute around 5% of our revenue by the end of the year. Q: We noticed a slight decline in gross margin to 65%. Is this temporary or structural due to AI ramp-up costs? How should we think about margin trends into 2026? A: The decline is mainly due to the early stage of our conversational AI products, which are currently at a subscale level. As usage and revenue ramp up, we expect margins to improve. For 2026, we anticipate flat gross margins compared to Q4 2025, with significant improvements in operating income driven by revenue growth and operating leverage. Q: How do you view the position of infrastructure and cybersecurity companies in the AI era, especially given market concerns about AI software? A: While AI coding may reduce costs in application layer development, core infrastructure services like ours are seeing increased demand. Our real-time engagement and API services are essential and not easily disrupted by AI coding. We are heavily invested in AI development and positioned as a leading innovator in the AI era. Q: What is the growth strategy for AI products like AI toys and customer service? Have you seen inflection points for adoption in these verticals? A: We see great margin potential for conversational AI products as they scale. Adoption is expected to grow throughout the year, with significant progress already made in 2025. We anticipate solving use cases gradually, leading to broader penetration across verticals. Cost reductions in AI models are also expected to support this growth. Q: After achieving full-year GAAP profitability in 2025, what are your expectations for operating income and margin expansion in 2026? A: We expect significant improvements in operating income, driven by revenue growth and improved operating leverage. Our goal is to achieve GAAP operating profit in Q4 2026, even after accounting for share-based compensation and amortization related to our headquarters project. For the complete transcript of the earnings call, please refer to the full earnings call transcript.