Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of June 29 2020. API went IPO

One of my companies, Agora.io, went IPO on NASDAQ yesterday with the ticker API. 

Tony Zhao, founder and CEO of Agora.io is one of the most underrated CEOs.  He founded Agora in 2014, with a vision to provide the best voice and video as a service to developers worldwide. Think Zoom + Twilio as a service.  Before Agora, he was CTO YY (NASDAQ: YY) - the Twitch of China with over 300M MAU. He was also a founding engineer at WebEx, the grandfather of all video conferencing. 

What does the rise of Agora really mean for the industry?

As Fred Wilson would say apps inspire infrastructure, then infrastructure enables new apps. Every decade, we see one major platform shift because of one breakout app.  Facebook for 2000s. WhatsApp for 2010s. Zoom for 2020s. 

These breakout apps inspire a period where we build infrastructure that makes it easier to build similar apps, and infrastructure that allows the broad consumer adoption of those apps. After all, not everyone feels comfortable running their entire business on Zoom. 

In this case, Agora.io empowers over 180,000 apps including:

• New social app - online dating
• Education - COVID savior 
• Entertainment - online karaoke (oh yes there is such thing!)
• Gaming - more Twitchs are coming
• Enterprise (sales, customer service, collaboration) 
• Financial services 
• Healthcare 

Congrats to Tony, Reggie, and your amazing team for the successful IPO yesterday. I am honored to play a small part in your journey.  To the video-first future!

This week a total of 14 startups raised $438.3M in funding, 3 M&As:

• $129M goes to 5 Enterprise startups
• $6.8M goes to 2 FinTech startups
• $242.5M goes to 4 Real Estate startups
• $15M goes to 1 Robotics startup
• $40M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
• $5M goes to 1 BioTech startup