Agora Inc: (API) Conferencia de resultados del T2 de 2026: Crecimiento de los ingresos e impulso de la IA de voz

Conclusiones principales

• Los ingresos del 2T 2026 aumentaron un 18% interanual hasta los 40,4 millones de dólares, superando el límite superior del rango de previsiones de la empresa y marcando un tercer trimestre consecutivo de crecimiento acelerado.
• El beneficio neto GAAP aumentó un 50,3% hasta los 2,2 millones de dólares, con un margen neto del 5,4%. Este fue el séptimo trimestre consecutivo de rentabilidad neta GAAP para Agora.
• La retención neta basada en dólares mejoró hasta el 104% desde el 94% del año anterior, impulsada por la demanda de interacción en tiempo real y la creciente adopción de la IA conversacional.
• El margen bruto disminuyó del 66,8% al 63,7% interanual a medida que se expandió el uso de la IA conversacional, aunque manteniéndose por debajo de la escala óptima. Mejoró ligeramente desde el 63,4% del 1T gracias a la optimización técnica.
• La dirección prevé unos ingresos para el 3T 2026 de entre 41 y 42 millones de dólares, lo que representa un crecimiento interanual del 15,8% al 18,6%.
• Agora mantiene su objetivo de que la IA conversacional represente el 5% de los ingresos al ritmo de ejecución del 4T o de cierre de año para finales de año, al tiempo que busca alcanzar la rentabilidad operativa trimestral GAAP para finales de 2026.

Datos financieros principales

Agora recompró aproximadamente 1 millón de ADS por cerca de 3,7 millones de dólares durante el 2T. Las recompras acumuladas bajo el programa actual alcanzaron aproximadamente 44,6 millones de ADS por 159,9 millones de dólares al 30 de junio de 2026. Los ADS en circulación disminuyeron a 83,8 millones desde los 87,3 millones a finales de 2025.

Desempeño operativo y del negocio

La IA conversacional fue el tema principal de crecimiento incremental en la conferencia de resultados del 2T 2026 de Agora. La dirección señaló que cada vez más clientes están pasando de proyectos de prueba de concepto a la producción comercial, particularmente en aplicaciones para centros de llamadas.

Las implementaciones actuales de agentes de IA de voz incluyen marketing saliente, cualificación de clientes potenciales, recopilación de información, programación de reuniones y encuestas de mercado. La dirección señaló que los agentes pueden ofrecer tasas de conversión similares a las de los representantes humanos en algunas tareas de marketing saliente, ofreciendo al mismo tiempo una mayor capacidad de llamadas y una mejora en el rendimiento unitario. Otras aplicaciones potenciales en desarrollo por parte de clientes incluyen la prospección en servicios financieros, la adquisición y retención de usuarios en videojuegos, y el cobro de deudas.

Agora también está expandiendo la IA conversacional a dispositivos de compañía. La empresa informó sobre avances en Japón y otros mercados, y está trabajando con fabricantes de chips para dar soporte a chips LTE especializados utilizados en dispositivos inteligentes y robots.

En el negocio principal de interacción en tiempo real, la demanda en los sectores de entretenimiento social y educación en China continuó recuperándose y se mostró estable. En Estados Unidos y otros mercados internacionales, la demanda procedente de casos de uso a gran escala en compras, servicios financieros y videojuegos continuó creciendo.

Agora también lanzó Agora Skills y Agora CLI para ayudar a desarrolladores humanos y agentes de codificación de IA a crear aplicaciones de interacción en tiempo real e IA conversacional. Su alianza con Gradium permite a los desarrolladores habilitar la tecnología de conversión de texto a voz de Gradium dentro del motor de IA conversacional de Agora mediante configuración sin costes adicionales de latencia.

Previsiones de la directiva

Agora prevé unos ingresos para el 3T 2026 de entre 41 y 42 millones de dólares, lo que implica un crecimiento del 15,8% al 18,6% interanual. La dirección señaló que esta perspectiva refleja opiniones actuales y preliminares, y sigue sujeta a cambios en las condiciones del mercado y de operación.

La empresa tiene como objetivo que la IA conversacional alcance el 5% de los ingresos sobre la base de un ritmo de ejecución (run-rate) para el 4T o finales de año. La directiva aclaró que la contribución de la IA conversacional a los ingresos de todo el año 2026 estará por debajo del 5%.

Agora también busca alcanzar la rentabilidad operativa trimestral GAAP para finales de 2026. A más largo plazo, la dirección cree que el margen bruto de la IA conversacional podría llegar a ser similar o superior al del negocio de interacción en tiempo real una vez que aumente la escala y se centre más la atención en la optimización de costes.

Riesgos y aspectos a vigilar

El margen bruto de la IA conversacional se mantiene cerca del umbral de rentabilidad porque las implementaciones aún están por debajo de la escala óptima y el uso se distribuye en múltiples geografías. Actualmente, la dirección prioriza la experiencia del cliente por encima de la optimización de costes.

Llevar un caso de uso de IA desde la prueba de concepto inicial hasta una producción constante y escalable puede llevar varios meses. La automatización de centros de llamadas también abarca muchos flujos de trabajo independientes con requisitos diferentes, lo que convierte la comercialización en un proceso de varios años en lugar de un único despliegue de producto.

La combinación de productos es otra consideración a corto plazo. El creciente uso de la IA conversacional contribuyó a la disminución interanual del margen bruto total, aunque la optimización técnica generó una ligera mejora secuencial.

La competencia abarca múltiples capas tecnológicas. La dirección citó las capacidades de la API de telecomunicaciones y números de teléfono de Twilio, mientras posiciona a Agora en torno a modelos de voz, procesamiento de audio, infraestructura en la nube de baja latencia y la capa de agentes.

El flujo de caja operativo fue negativo en 2,1 millones de dólares en el 2T a pesar del beneficio neto GAAP positivo, frente a un saldo negativo de 0,4 millones de dólares un año antes.

Puntos destacados del turno de preguntas y respuestas con analistas

La dirección describió el futuro mercado de centros de llamadas en tres segmentos: tareas sencillas gestionadas por tecnología IVR, tareas altamente sensibles o críticas mantenidas por humanos, y una amplia categoría intermedia gestionada por agentes inteligentes de IA de voz. Agora prevé que el segmento intermedio represente una parte significativa del mercado.

Sobre la rentabilidad económica de la IA, la dirección atribuyó el bajo margen bruto actual a la escala limitada, el uso geográfico fragmentado y un énfasis inicial en el rendimiento en lugar del coste. Se espera que un mayor volumen y la optimización técnica de costes mejoren los márgenes con el tiempo.

En cuanto a los retornos de capital, la empresa declaró que la compra adicional de acciones en el mercado abierto por 20 millones de dólares anunciada por el CEO Tony Zhao no había comenzado debido a restricciones legales y de periodo de indisponibilidad (blackout). Cualquier compra sigue sujeta a las condiciones aplicables. La dirección afirmó que Agora no está considerando excluir a la empresa de bolsa ni planea actualmente un dividendo extraordinario.

Transcripción completa de la conferencia de resultados

Transcripción completa de la conferencia de resultados

Comentarios de la dirección

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Agora Inc. Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

The company's earnings results press release, earnings presentation, SEC filings, and a replay of today's call can be found on its IR website at investor.agora.io.

Joining me today are Tony Zhao, Founder, Chairman and CEO; Jingbo Wang, the company's CFO.

During this call, the company will make forward-looking statements about its future financial performance and other future events and trends. These statements are only predictions that we -- based on what the company believes today and actual results may differ materially. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could affect the company's financial results and the performance of its business, and which the company discussed in detail in its filings with the SEC, including today's press release and the risk factors of other information contained in the final prospectus relating to the initial public offering. Agora Inc. remains no obligation to update any forward-looking statements the company may make on today's call.

With that, let me turn the call over to Tony. Hi, Tony.

Bin Zhao

Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone, to our earnings call. Let me begin with a review of our operating results for the quarter. I'm pleased to report another quarter of accelerating top line growth as well as our seventh consecutive quarter of GAAP profitability. Total revenues for the second quarter of 2026 reached $40.4 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year. This performance reflects both the continued strength of our core real-time engagement business and the growing contribution from our conversational AI products as more customers move from proof of concept to commercial production.

Our GAAP net profit for the quarter was $2.2 million, up 50% year-over-year, which demonstrates improved operating leverage and disciplined cost management across the organization. Our most important progress this quarter occurred in call center across the globe. We are seeing strong momentum in adoption of our voice AI agent. Trained on the best sales and customer service playbooks, this agent delivered consistent high-quality performance across every conversation. They do not experience fatigue, lose focus or vary in performance based on workload or time of day. They also maintain calm and steady interactions even during challenging calls.

Further, customers are now seeing substantial cost savings from deploying our voice AI agent. Indeed, we're beginning to see them match or even surpass human performance in an increasing number of tasks in achieving target business outcomes. The first example is outbound marketing and buyer interest capture. Our voice AI agents are now being used to initiate calls, qualifying leads, collect information and schedule meetings with prospect customers at a similar conversion rates with human reps. Our voice AI agent also outperformed in 2 other important areas: the volume of calls they can handle and unit economics they deliver. The second example is market survey. Our voice AI agent can conduct in-depth interviews for consumer insights and product feedback, while capturing structured data throughout each conversation.

The high concurrency of our solution compresses the time it takes to conduct large-scale survey that traditionally takes weeks or days into just a few hours. Marketing and surveying are only 2 examples of how voice AI agent can reshape call center worldwide. We see similar opportunities in financial services outreach, gaming user acquisition and retention, debt collection and many other areas. We are already working with customers across these sectors, and we expect several of them to move from proof of concept to large-scale deployment in the coming quarters.

At the same time, we continue to invest in our developer ecosystem. This quarter, we launched Agora Skills and Agora CLI. Agora Skills package our platform knowledge for the AI coding assistants, including Claude Code, Cursor or Codex and work with our latest SDKs and best practices when building real-time engagement or conversational AI applications. The Agora CLI complements this with a single command-line interface for coding agents to do their work. Together, these tools make it easier for both human developers and AI coding agents to build and deploy real-time engagement applications with us. We're also continuing to strengthen our technology ecosystem through strategic partnerships. This quarter, we announced a partnership with Gradium, a leading voice AI platform recently founded by the research team behind WuXi and TBK, two speech models with strong recognition in the open source community.

Through our partnership, developers can enable Gradium TTS within our conversational AI engine through a simple configuration without introducing additional latency costs. Looking ahead, we will first remain laser focused on accelerating the transition of our conversational AI solutions from pilot to production across use cases. Each use case will present its own set of challenges, but each will also help us refine our technology. We believe that continued improvements in our solutions will unlock additional demand and drive industry shift towards AI-led workflows in call centers.

Second, we will continue to invest in our real-time infrastructure. Our software-defined real-time network or SD-RTN, has long been a foundational advantage for us. As we expand into human to AI interactions, the importance of this infrastructure does not diminish. On the contrary, it becomes more critical because smooth conversations require ultralow latency inference and transmission. We are confident that our investment in real-time inference and the communication infrastructure will serve as a decisive factor in our ability to compete and succeed in the conversational AI arena.

And third, we will continue to strengthen our partner ecosystem and build up developer venture. On October 23 and 24, we will host our iconic and annual conference, IRTE, or Intelligent Real-Time Engagement in Beijing. We look forward to bringing together developers partners, enterprises and industry leaders to explore the next phase of real-time engagement and conversational AI.

In summary, we believe the center of gravity in the AI industry is increasingly shifting from model capabilities towards infrastructure and hardness layer required to operate voice AI agents reliably at scale. At the intersection of real-time engagement, AI and global infrastructure, we believe Agora is uniquely positioned to help enterprise market to help enterprise make this transition and create sustainable long-term value for both our customers and shareholders. Before I conclude, I would like to thank our customers, developers, partners, and shareholders for their continued trust and support and our global Agora and Shenghong teams for their dedication and innovation.

With that, let me turn it over to Jingbo, who will review our financial results.

Jingbo Wang

Thanks, Tony. Hello, everyone. Let me start by first reviewing financial results for the second quarter of 2026, and then I will discuss the outlook for the third quarter. Total revenue for second quarter reached $40.4 million, above the high end of the guidance range and representing 18% year-over-year growth. This marks our third consecutive quarter of accelerating growth, driven by continued expansion of our real-time engagement services across sectors such as e-commerce as well as growing customer adoption of our conversational AI solutions. Our dollar-based net retention rate for the quarter was 104% compared to 94% in the second quarter of 2025. This represents a meaningful improvement and moves us back above 100%. Gross profit for the quarter was $25.7 million, representing 12.5% increase year-over-year. Gross margin was 63.7% compared to 66.8% in the same period last year and 63.4% in the first quarter of 2026. On a year-over-year basis, the decline was primarily due to product mix change as conversational AI products continue to see growing usage during the quarter, but has remained at a subscale stage. On a sequential basis, the increase was mainly driven by technical optimization.

Turning to expenses. R&D expenses were $15.4 million in Q2, up 10.2% year-over-year. R&D expenses represented 38.1% of total revenue in the quarter compared to 40.8% in the same period last year. The increase was primarily due to our continued investment in conversational AI products. Sales and marketing expenses were $6.4 million in Q2, down 1.5% year-over-year. Sales and marketing expenses represented 15.9% of total revenue in the quarter compared to 19% in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to disciplined expense management. General and administrative expenses were $5.5 million in Q2, down 9.5% year-over-year.

G&A expenses represented 13.5% of total revenue in the quarter compared to 17.6% in the same period last year. The decrease was primarily due to a lower allowance for current expected credit loss as customer credit conditions and collection outcomes improved. Turning to operating results. We recorded GAAP operating loss of $1 million in the second quarter compared to a loss of $3.1 million in the same period last year, thanks to continued improvement in operating leverage. Based on our current business momentum, our goal is to achieve quarterly GAAP operating profitability by the end of this year. Moving on to the bottom line. We delivered net income of $2.2 million in Q2, up 50.3% year-over-year and representing a net income margin of 5.4%.

Now turning to cash flow. Operating cash flow was negative $2.1 million in Q2 compared to negative $0.4 million in the second quarter of 2025. Moving on to balance sheet. We ended Q2 with $361.7 million in cash, cash equivalents, bank deposits and financial products issued by banks. The decrease in our cash balance was mainly due to annual bonus payments as well as share repurchase during the quarter. During Q2, we repurchased approximately 1 million ADS for approximately $3.7 million. As of June 30, 2026, we have repurchased approximately 44.6 million ADS in total for approximately $159.9 million under the current share repurchase program.

As of June 30, 2026, we had 83.8 million ADS outstanding, compared to 87.3 million ADS at the end of 2025. The current share repurchase program will expire at the end of February 2027. Now turning to guidance. Based on currently available information, we expect total revenue for the third quarter of 2026 to be between $41 million and $42 million, representing year-over-year growth of 15.8% to 18.6%. This outlook reflects our current and preliminary views on the market and operational conditions, which are subject to change.

In closing, this was another strong quarter for us, both in terms of revenue growth and profitability. At the same time, we are increasingly encouraged by usage momentum and commercial potential in conversational AI, and we'll continue to invest with discipline to support our long-term growth. Thank you all for joining today's call.

Let's open it up for questions.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is going to come from the line of Harry Zhuang with BofA Securities.

Preguntas y respuestas

Harry Zhuang

Congratulations on the strong results and guidance. I have 3 questions. The first one is regarding the demand. How is the demand trend in overseas and domestic market? And what are the key sectors driving the growth? Second one is regarding AI. We're happy to see that the call center application levers growing really fast. And what are the other data scenarios that could drive meaningful conversational AI demand growth? And what will be the revenue contribution from conversational AI by end of the year and the gross margin trend? And lastly, about the competition, could management share the latest competitive landscape in overseas market against our major competitors?

Jingbo Wang

Okay. In terms of demand, I will talk about the RTE side and Tony can talk about the AI side. So on RTE side, actually things haven't changed that much overall what we see this quarter in both China and U.S. and international markets, largely the same as the last quarter. So in China, thanks to a more stable operating environment. So demand from social entertainment, and education customers continue to recover. So I think they're looking pretty stable here. On the U.S. and international side, demand from large shopping, financial services, gaming use cases continue to grow. So demand looks healthy on the RTE side.

Bin Zhao

Yes. And on the AI side, I think it's fair to say, our vision has been validated and reinforced in our daily business with rapid development and continued improvement we achieved on the ground. In call centers, as I mentioned in the remarks, with AI agents matching and sometimes even surpass human reps on certain tasks with solid verifiable business outcome for the enterprise customers. This is just the beginning of a very, very long run, and I believe we will witness the transition from human call center reps to AI agents around the world besides how large language model has reshaped the software engineering. This is actually a very good thing for people and the society because it will free people from very tedious and stressful line of work. Keep talking to different persons for hours about the same task and keep the conversation strictly professional is very exhausting and emotionally draining.

Jingbo Wang

Yes. So in terms of the use case for conversational AI, I can talk about 2 verticals: call center and companionship devices. But Tony already talked about a lot -- covered a lot on the call centers. But I want to highlight 1 point. When we talk about cost centers, it's not a single use case. It's a collection of many, many use cases, each with different features and different knowledge. And when we talk about these use cases, actually, in terms of difficulty for replacement by those AI agents, actually they form a spectrum from the easy ones on the left-hand side to the hard ones on right-hand side. And now we are only beginning to explore a few use cases on the license side, such as outbound marketing survey. But these are low hanging fruits. As we continue to refine our solutions and accumulate more experience working with our customers, we will convert more and more use cases from impossible to proof of concept to real-world production. So it has a very long run rate. It's not one single use case we can counter in 1 quarter or in 1 year. It's going to be a multiyear process.

And secondly, on the companionship device, we talked with our customers in the past. In this quarter, we actually expanded into new markets in Japan and other countries, and the initial feedback has been quite encouraging. We also partnered with several chip makers to make our solution compatible with more chips because these are not mobile phone chips, these are very specialized LTE chips and this will make our solution available on a wider range of smart devices, including robots. So overall, we are still targeting a 5% revenue contribution from conversational AI by the end of this year. Competition. Tony, do you want to talk about competition?

Bin Zhao

Okay. You want to talk about gross margin or not?

Jingbo Wang

Not at this time.

Bin Zhao

Okay. So about competition, especially on conversational AI, conversational AI has several distinct technology layers from the agent layer that orchestrate and optimize the call center or the call experience to model layer that includes large language model and voice models such as ASR or TTS. And finally, infra layer such as telecom APIs and cloud. Different layers -- different players attack this market from different angles. For example, Twilio would leverage its strength in telecom API and phone numbers from their CCaaS business. And we are focused on the voice models, audio preprocessing and post-processing, low-latency cloud infrastructure and agent layer to deliver the best possible call experience.

Given the huge potential of the conversational AI market, it is natural to have competition. In fact, a lot of the technology in conversational AI involves audio processing, such as handling noise echos or packet loss. Obviously, we have a lot of experience in those areas which can hugely improve conversational AI experience. So we remain confident about our position in this market.

Jingbo Wang

Harry, does that answer your question?

Harry Zhuang

Yes. They were helpful. Congratulations again on the results.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Yue Xu with China Securities Co.

Yue Xu

Congrats on another strong quarter. My first question is in regards to conversational AI. So could you please update on conversational AI revenue progress and the projected contribution to full year value? My second question is the conversion cycle for AI use cases. Could you disclose the current backlog for this AI use cases and foreign maybe just customer accounts? And how would you view the trend for AI revenue for coming quarters, maybe next year?

Jingbo Wang

Thank you. Thanks for question. So we already talked a lot about the use cases. So first of all I want to explain that, it actually takes quite some time for a use case to really ramp up from the start of the POC point where AI agents can deliver consistent performance and can be deployed at scale. It only takes several months. And I talked about there are many, many use cases we need to attack them one by one. And also, we can do a few in parallel but still is going to take -- is going to be quite a process. So as I mentioned earlier, we're targeting 5% revenue contribution by the end of the year.

So basically our goal is in Q4 or in terms of the run rate, AI run rate, we want to achieve 5% by the end of the year. Obviously, that means for the full year of 2026, it's not going to be 5%. It's going to be smaller than that. But as we -- if we achieve 5% by the end of the year, and given the strong pipeline we already have on hand, which will only become bigger by the end of the year. We believe there will be still significant room for growth next year. Yes. So we remain quite optimistic at how we are looking in this market.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Zongxuan Yang with Citic Securities.

Zongxuan Yang

Okay. I just have one question regarding to our AI business. So have you ever given any guidance on the long term for about 3 to 5 years for the AI penetration rate for our total revenue and also for the gross margin guidance?

Bin Zhao

I'll take the question. In the end, the call center market will have 3 segments. First is easiest tasks, such as simple notifications. This will be handled by IVR-based technology, which has no real intelligence but can understand simple keywords from human. The second would be the hardest task or most important tasks such as handling complaints from high-value customers or emergency situation, which will continue to be handled by humans. Even if AI agent is technically able to handle the task, in some cases, only humans can take certain responsibilities, such as in the 911 call. The third would be everything else in the middle of the previous tool, those will be handled by voice AI agents with real intelligence. It's hard to say exactly how big this part will be, but it will be a significant portion of the entire market.

Jingbo Wang

So yes. So Tony talked about the 3- to 5-year outlook for the call center market, which is a huge market. There are literally close to 20 million people working in call center today in the world. And as Tony said, there will be 3 categories in the future. And probably in the middle category will be the biggest, and that will be handled by voice AI agents. So even taking a small part of the market that would be transformational for our company. So at this point, it's hard to give a clear number as this market is still at a very, very early stage. And the overall penetration of AI agents is still very low. So it's hard to say exactly how this will become, but it certainly will be a transformation for us.

And in terms of the gross margin. Today, the gross margin is not high for us. We talked about that last quarter, it's crossing the negative positive line, but it's still around there. But it's not because fundamentally -- any fundamental reason is because, one, we are subscale. The volume is more and volume happened at different geographies. So at each single geography, or even smaller. So subscale. And secondly, we haven't really focused much on the technical optimization. Right now, our optimization is more focused on the experience about the cost. So once we have larger schedule and also be more focused on the technical activation on cost, we believe in the end, the gross margin will be similar to if not higher than what we have right now in the RTE business.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of [ Tristan Yang ] with [ DoubleLine Capital ].

Unknown Analyst

Nice results today. Tony, regarding your announcement to purchase the additional $20 million of shares on the open market, I'm wondering how much have you purchased to date? And then what valuation do you believe appropriately reflects Agora's intrinsic value? And then given your existing ownership stake, have you considered taking the company private or returning additional capital to shareholders through a special dividend or an accelerated buyback program?

Jingbo Wang

Let me answer this question because it's more quite technical. So definitely, Tony has not started due to certain blackout and legal restrictions. But once these are cleared, he will start repurchase -- so obviously, insider and he has previous purchase in the past at beginning of this year. So there are certain legal restrictions. So as to the $20 million, that has not started yet. We have returned up to this point, about $160 million of capital back to the shareholders through share repurchase. And that compares to what about $400 million, $350 million of market cap of the company, which is substantial and probably among the most substantial among any public company in the world. So we will continue to do that. But at this point, we have not considered a special dividend, which we might consider in the future, but not at present.

Bin Zhao

I think my purchase will start in like 2, 3 weeks, right? September, October.

Jingbo Wang

Yes. Yes, subject to certain conditions.

Bin Zhao

Okay. I don't think we will consider take the company off the market. We will want to keep communicate with capital market and for ourselves focused on business operation and improve our overall technical and operation strengths. We're still very confident that the future of our direction has a very big potential. And we think by focus on our business operations and technical advancement, we will be able to make a lot of value for our customers, our shareholders and our employees.

Operator

Showing no further questions. This will conclude today's Q&A session. Thank you, everybody, for attending the company's call today. As a reminder, a recording and the earnings release will be available on the company's website at investor.agora.io. And if you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail the company. Thank you. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.