Agora

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. 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.

Employee accounts paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗. See our methodology.