Agora Q2 Earnings Call Highlights

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.

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%.

Conversational AI Focuses on Call Centers 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.

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.

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.