Agora is a real-time engagement platform-as-a-service (RTE-PaaS) company. It provides developers with APIs and SDKs to embed video calling, voice calling, live streaming, chat, and conversational AI into their own applications. Rather than building real-time communication infrastructure themselves, developers integrate Agora's technology to deliver low-latency audio and video experiences to end users. Agora operates two independent divisions: Agora (Santa Clara), serving global markets with traction in live shopping, social entertainment, and education; and Shengwang (Shanghai), serving China across social/entertainment, IoT, and enterprise digital transformation. Agora's revenue model is usage-based with a freemium on-ramp — developers get 10,000 free minutes per month, and once usage exceeds this threshold, customers pay based on minutes consumed across products. Revenue scales naturally as customers' applications and end-user bases grow. The core infrastructure is Agora's SD-RTN (Software Defined Real-Time Network), a proprietary virtual network overlay running on 200+ data centers globally, which Agora argues gives it a technical advantage by enabling dynamic routing optimization for low latency and minimal packet loss. Agora's newer conversational AI engine, launched in early 2025, adds a chained model pipeline — speech-to-text, LLM orchestration, and text-to-speech — priced at roughly an order of magnitude higher than standard audio products. Key use cases include customer service voice agents, AI companionship devices, and education. Agora also supports developer adoption through the TEN Framework, an open-source project for building conversational AI agents.