20 Things You Didn’t Know About Agora
Agora is an American startup that has been making news in business journals and the construction industry. It is a materials management platform that helps to make the work of contractors flow more smoothly. If this is the first time that you’re hearing about this enterprise, and you’re a contractor in the industry, it may offer some useful solutions for your business. Here are 20 things you probably didn’t know about Agora that you might find interesting.
1. Agora is a young company
According to Crunchbase, Agora is still a relatively young company. It was founded in 2018 and has only been in operation for three years. Although the enterprise is still in the infancy stage of its development, it is growing and expanding at an impressive rate.
2. Agora is a versatile and diverse company
Agora is spotlighted in the United States as a diverse company that is woman-led. It was founded by Maria Rioumine and Ryan Gibson. The headquarters is located in San Francisco, California. The company is listed under four industry categories including construction, logistics, software, and supply chain management. It is often referred to as Agora, but the legal name is Agora Systems, Inc.
3. Agora has a six-member executive leadership team
The executive leadership team of Agora is comprised of six members. Maria Rioumine is a co-founder and serves as the chief executive officer. Micah Rodman is the chief operating officer founding tam. Ryan Gibson is a co-founder and chief technical officer. RobinsonSwope is a customer success manager. Adam Williams is a founding software engineer. Michael Oliver is a founding software engineer.
4. Agora uses a complex array of technologies to power its website
Agora’s website is powered by thirty-seven active technologies. Some of these include iPhone Mobile Compatible, LetsEncrypt, Apple Mobile Web Clips Icon, and a few dozen others. Although the company has not disclosed the annual overhead costs for these technology products and services, we know from experience that it often runs into tens of thousands of dollars per year for the subscriptions and fees.
5. Agora maintains an edge over competitors in the industry
Agora is a unique software provider for managers and contractors in the construction industry. The product and services that it provides for its clients are legally protected from being copied or imitated by others. The company has secured two registered trademarks in the basic staples category. This means that the services it provides are different from other companies offering similar software solutions. The trademarked intellectual property of the company helps it to stand out from other companies.
6. Agora’s website is gaining in popularity
Although Agora is still a new company, it is experiencing an increase in the number of visitors that come to the website. Analytics for the company show that over the past thirty days, there have been 4,236 visits to the site. It has achieved a ranking of number 1,746,729 of the millions of websites that are registered on the world wide web.
7. Agora is the most popular in the United States
Agora is a US-based company that hasn’t been in operation for very long. There are a lot of prospective customers in the world that have yet to hear about the products and solutions that it offers. So far, it has become more popular with visitors to the website from people who live in the United States. Ninety-four percent of the web traffic comes from this country. Six percent of the web traffic comes from people in Canada, and six percent from visitors from Bangladesh. This information is useful for helping key decision-makers at Agora understand where the majority of the interest in their products and services is coming from.
8. Agora is a venture capital-backed enterprise
According to Techcrunch, Agora has attracted the attention and interest of venture capital firms for its financial support. The business has participated in three rounds of venture capital fundraising so far, with the most recent Series B round closing on August 12, 2021. So far, Agora has raised $44.6 million in funding.
9. Agora has a large investor base
We learned that Agora has secured the commitment for funding from two lead investors, joined by a total of twenty-one investors. The investors have confidence that the enterprise will continue to grow and prosper, providing them with a healthy return on the dollars invested in the company’s future. Tiger Global Management led the most recent funding round, raising $33 million. Other investors include Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, DST Global, Michael Ovitz, LeFrak, Kevin Hartz, Tishman Speyer, 8VC, Nine-four Ventures, Suffolk Construction, and several others.
10. Agora helps construction contractors through automation
The technology that Agora provides in its software platform helps construction contractors and others in commercial trade industries to order and track their materials. It also automates manual data entry and distributes the information involved in the procurement process to all stakeholders in the system. This helps everyone involved to communicate more easily with one another. It helps the projects to move faster and to eliminate unnecessary delays. It can also help to reduce building costs. It is a SaaS platform that helps those in the construction industry to have a smoother experience.
11. Agora’s revenues are growing exponentially
Agora is a new company, but it’s seeing high growth in its revenue as reported from the last twelve months. The growth rate is an exponential 760 percent within the last year. It has grown its customer base to six times the original base figure and tripled the headcount of its employees. The enterprise processes $140 million in annualized materials volume for the professionals in the construction industries currently served.
12. Agora could be a disruptor in the supply chain industry
Agora is industry-specific in its approach. It is taking this stance to best serve each client that it serves. The company seeks to define how the future of procurement in construction will be by offering the convenience of automation in a communications and tracking platform that will eliminate much of the guesswork and confusion that can arise throughout procurement processes. Breakages in the supply chain and other parts of the procurement process have been notoriously inefficient. This was the main problem that the co-founders of Agora sought to address with their technology solutions. Agora has the potential to become a huge disruptor within the current industry to solve many of the current problems and help to keep everyone in the know and on track with the latest news about the procurement of materials. It has the potential for saving the billions of dollars that are wasted each year on procurement inefficiencies.
13. Agora offers customization
The Agora platform provides software that can be tailored to meet each user’s needs with customized templates, and the ability to create pre-approved materials lists. It also provides the tools for making frequent reorders of the items most commonly needed, as well as orders through a catalog of over 400K SKUs. These features help to eliminate the need for manual data entry for tracking and it also helps limit the number of errors made through a basic automated process.
14. Agora helps bring all the players together
Agora provides one digital platform that can bring everyone involved in a construction project together. It helps office staff to reduce the amount of time processing purchase orders. Field teams do far less on materials management because it’s nearly all done through automation. Agora estimates that its clients can save around $300,000 per year by using the app. This includes money save on the reduction of errors made and the hundreds or even thousands of hours saved in time spent on labor-related tasks and data entry.
15. Agora is planning to expand
We also learned that Agora’s key leadership team has plans to expand its operation. The recent infusion of investment funds has made it possible to expand its portion beyond the 30 states that it now serves, and even move into other trade verticals. Because Agora has not been around for long, it hasn’t had time to reach the majority of professionals and companies that could benefit from its construction material management platform. It is estimated that once more hear about it, many of them will come on board for the convenience and savings on major projects. Like any new company, it takes a while for Agora to get the word out, but we believe that it’s going to gain a great deal of press in the months to come.
16. Agora is a privately held business
Agora is still a privately owned company. You won’t be able to find shares of Agora stock offered for sale or trade on any of the public stock exchanges. So far, we’ve seen no evidence of any discussions about taking the company public. There hasn’t been a need to seek this type of funding because Agora has so many investors providing its support for growth and expansion. With twenty-one investors behind the firm, Agora will likely continue to remain a privately owned business for some time. The precise nature of its agreements with investors has not yet been publicly disclosed, but it’s assumed that each has become a stakeholder in the company with some type of guarantee on payments from the proceeds when the company becomes profitable.
17. Agora is currently hiring
According to its LinkedIn profile, Agora is currently hiring. The startup has listed twelve open positions in its search and recruitment of talent. It’s getting ready to add to the current small workforce of fifty employees.
18. Agora is building its infrastructure
We looked through the current job announcements to get an idea about where Agora is expanding its presence. We saw that most of the new positions are being offered to candidates in the San Francisco area. This tells us that Agora is beefing up the infrastructure at its headquarters in advance of its expansion into other areas.
19. Agora has a presence in other states
Although Agora is based in San Francisco, California, we did see that it is offering jobs to people living in other parts of the country. There is a position listed for a UX Researcher for Agora Systems in Portland, Oregon. The position will be for remote work. Another job is listed as a sales development representative for Agora Systems in Austin, Texas. As the job in Portland, Oregon, this is also a position for a remote worker. Only three of the twelve jobs listed are for places other than the main headquarter region.
20. Agora is a company to keep your eye on
Although Agora Systems is a fairly new company that hasn’t been in business for long, it bears watching. This enterprise offers a service that has the potential for turning the construction procurement niche of the industry on its head with money-saving software solutions that help construction managers and contractors to more efficiently manage the procurement of materials. Agora’s SaaS platform could revolutionize the way that contractors manage their work in far-reaching ways that extend to office workers and other stakeholders in construction projects. Agora also has plans to expand its operations into other verticals within the industry. There is an impressive number of twenty-one wise investors who saw their chance to get in on the ground floor of an exciting and dynamic new company that offers useful products and services that are likely to catch on as a fix to many of the current problems in the construction industry. Construction is an industry that has long been underserved until now. It will be interesting to watch Agora over the next few months and years. We expect it to continue to grow and expand quickly. Although it’s only offering investment privileges to private VC investors currently, you never know when things could change.
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