SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Agora, the leading voice, video and live broadcasting platform, today announced the hiring of several established business, technology, and sales leaders who will serve in key management roles as the company expands its solutions and services to new markets and industry verticals globally. The wave of new hires comes shortly after Agora closed $70 million in a Series C round of funding led by Coatue Management, a leading technology investor known for its investments in Uber, SnapChat, Box.com, Lime, DoorDash, and others.
2018 has been a year of hyper growth for the company, fueled by a larger shift in the cloud communications industry as more developers and businesses embed live voice and video functionality into web and mobile applications. By providing scalable solutions that drive real-time engagement for a wide range of industry verticals spanning social media, e-commerce, financial services, gaming, and more, Agora is emerging as a global leader in the new era of cloud communications.
"As our high growth continues, we will need a strong support system to achieve continued success, so we plan to continue bolstering our team with the best talent there is," said Reggie Yativ, CRO and COO at Agora. "We're excited to welcome a variety of talent from different sectors of the technology industry and look forward to leveraging their expertise to build Agora into a cloud communications technology powerhouse."
Richard Gatchalian, Director of Sales, has held executive-level enterprise sales positions at prominent cloud communications companies including BlueJeans Network and Zoom Video Communications. Richard organizes and oversees Agora's international sales plans and team.
Yaniv Elmadawi, VP of Solutions and Technology Services, is a versatile technology professional and a former Vidyo executive who brings vast technical expertise in technology implementation, customer support/success, and cloud operations. Yaniv oversees Agora's solution architects, who work with customers to integrate Agora's APIs/SDKs into their existing applications.
Tom Wang, VP of Customer Success & Product, manages Agora's customer success team as well as the products and services. He joins Agora with over 20 years of software development experience and 15 years of engineering team management experience at leading technology companies WebEx/Cisco, Vobile, WebTV/Microsoft and others.
Lincoln Luk, Director of Product Marketing, leads Agora's global product marketing efforts. He brings over 16 years of digital media, broadcast and consumer market experience to Agora, having worked with Fortune 100 companies including DIRECTV, Citigroup and Walt Disney Company. Before joining Agora, Lincoln was a senior technical program manager at Microsoft and worked on an AI-enhanced, cloud-based global CRM platform.
Konstantin Baikov, Director of Global Partner Ecosystems, previously headed global partnerships and business development for Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Nokia. Konstantin is responsible for implementing and overseeing Agora's global partnership program.
The new hires join a strong existing leadership team, which includes Virginia Liu, Vice President of Developer Ecosystem and Partner Programs; Dave Dabbah, Vice President of Marketing; Tony Wang, Head of Emerging Markets; Sharon Kittredje, Head of People Operations; and Todd Anderson, Executive Director of Strategic Account.
Agora's rapid growth mirrors the booming communications platform as a service (CPaaS) market, which is expected to exceed $8 billion in 2019 according to Statista. In addition to the growth in developer and end-user adoption, Agora also increased year-over-year net profit by 90 percent, while also doubling the number of registered projects on its platform and tripling network traffic to 300 million minutes of communications per day. Agora's new team members, a few of whom will serve in executive-level positions, will play an integral part in maintaining Agora's track record as the premier provider of high-quality, ultra low-latency voice, video and live broadcasting solutions to users across the globe.
"We started Agora with a vision to connect everyone in the world with accessible and reliable communications capabilities through the use of the Internet," said Tony (Bin) Zhao, founder and CEO of Agora. "I'm proud to say we are one step closer to that goal and our growth is a true testament to our industry-leading product and engineering teams."
Powered by globally distributed data centers, Agora's proprietary software-defined real-time network (SD-RTN™) consistently delivers high-definition, low-latency voice and video communications to end users even as it rapidly expands to meet market demands.
About Agora
Founded in 2014, Agora is a global company with offices in Santa Clara and Shanghai and customers in over 100 countries. Agora offers a real-time engagement platform as a service that allows developers to easily embed voice and video chat, interactive broadcasting, and messaging on a global scale for any mobile, Web or desktop application. With over 12 billion minutes of monthly usage on our network, Agora is trusted by developers and brands across the globe with use cases ranging from gaming, social, e-commerce, education, to healthcare and more.
The Agora platform is powered by the Agora Software Defined Real Time Network (SD-RTN™), a global delivery network of data centers. SD-RTN™ dynamically manages the routing of voice and video to overcome severe packet loss incidents and enable a seamless, uninterrupted, high-quality real-time delivery across the globe, even in the most remote locations and emerging markets.
For more information, please visit www.agora.io.
SOURCE Agora
