In just two months, the clubhouse has become the place of choice for luminaries such as Elon Musk or Drake to exhibit everything from telepathic monkeys to stock market valuations. But the real winner of the stratospheric growth of the audio-chat application is a losing Shanghai startup called Agora Inc.
Agora, known mostly in technology circles as a hard-working but low-profile software provider, has risen by more than 150% since mid-January, when online discussions began about how to power the hottest social media forum in the world. That’s because the little-known company – now worth nearly $ 10 billion – provides developers with everything they need to build real-time voice and video features in applications: a template known as a software development kit.
Agora – the ancient Greek for a forum or market – was publicly linked to the Clubhouse IPO last summer, although it remains unclear to what extent the red social media forum used its software kit. The decomposition of the Clubhouse application reveals the name Agora in the code, which means that Clubhouse uses at least part of the Chinese company’s SDK, according to two engineers familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because removing the software code violates Apple’s policies. iOS users.
Clubhouse co-founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth said in conversations in the app that they use Agora, according to two people who heard those discussions but asked not to be named because Clubhouse does not speak publicly about its technical stack. And in an experiment this week, German software engineer Andreas Lehr told Bloomberg News that he analyzed the traffic coming out of his phone while connected to the Clubhouse and noticed several calls to agora.io.
Beyond just fueling the price of Agora shares, however, the amorphous connection is starting to cause concerns about the security of the application. It is the same vague fear that attaches itself to the largest company from the owner of TikTok ByteDance Ltd. to unheard of outfits: the fact that Beijing has the power not only to demand the submission of data at will, but also to force Chinese companies to spy on its name. Agora declined to comment on his relationship with Clubhouse, but said in a statement that he took privacy and security seriously.
“As with Zoom, Agora continues to run its centralized service in different jurisdictions,” said Suji Yan, founder and CEO of the Mask Network, which builds a tool for users to post. encrypted messages on Twitter and Facebook. “It is difficult for a public corporation like Agora not to respond to the request of a local government.”
The debate over the extent of Agora’s involvement comes just as Beijing appears to be moving against Clubhouse. Many users of the app in China say they have not been able to access the service on Monday, after an explosion of discussions over the weekend on taboo topics from Taiwan to Xinjiang.
But the potential for surveillance worries international users. Chinese law requires its companies to provide information upon request and even to collect data on behalf of Beijing, if it is considered in the interests of national security. This, along with accusations by US lawmakers that Chinese companies can build back doors into devices and software that the Communist Party can exploit, is at the center of growing hostility to China’s largest technology providers.
Agora customizable tools run on users’ devices as part of client applications such as Clubhouse. Agora co-founder Tony Wang told the media that the company does not store end-user data, but serves as a “passage”. But, from a technical perspective, it obtains real-time voice data that it helps transmit to the Clubhouse. He will not be able to identify this with users’ mobile numbers – which in turn unearth their real-world identities – because the data is handled by the clubhouse itself, according to the two engineers familiar with the problem.
In theory, Chinese agents can control Agora’s voice data with other voice data that links to real IDs – for example, those from Chinese state telecom operators – as a way to identify activists or dissidents, Mask said. Network’s Yan.
“Right now I don’t think the government would have the computing power to do that, but you can’t rule out that possibility for the future,” Yan said. “And cross-referencing voice data related to the same number of cells will leak more data and cause more potential problems than we thought.”
Launched in 2013 by software engineer Tony Zhao, Agora has become one of China’s largest providers of real-time communication technologies, offering big names such as teaching service provider New Oriental Education & Technology Group and dating application operator The Meeting. Group. It has attracted investment from venture capital firms, including GIS, Coatue Management and China’s Morningside, which is also one of the first supporters of the short-term application Kuaishou Technology.
Revenue rose 81 percent to $ 30.8 million for the September quarter, when companies outside China contributed more than 20 percent of sales, analysts said in a post-earnings call in November.
Agora itself highlighted China’s complex regime of internet regulation as a risk factor in its IPO prospectus, adding that it may be necessary to take further steps to comply with European Union GDPR privacy laws or regulations elsewhere. It currently offers products in over 100 countries.
However, speculation about the Chinese roots of the Clubhouse has not affected its global popularity for the time being, nor its actions in Beijing.
“The Chinese-language talks we have heard over the past week have been remarkable in that they have touched on issues that are heavily censored in China, while allowing open discussions across the Chinese border,” said Graham Webster of Stanford Cyber University Policy Center.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published in a syndicated stream.)