Two Funding Rounds in a Year — What’s Agora’s Growth Logic That Attracts Capital?

On July 10, stablecoin company Agora announced the completion of a $50 million Series A funding round, led by crypto venture capital firm Paradigm, with early investors like Dragonfly also participating. This funding round comes just a year after their seed round completed in 2024, which raised a total of $12 million, with investors including Foresight Ventures, Hack VC, Galaxy Digital, and others.

Currently, the stablecoin market is dominated by leading projects such as Tether and Circle, while Agora is still in the early stages, with a circulating market capitalization of its core product AUSD at approximately $160 million. Despite the concentrated industry landscape and increasingly clear regulatory environment, the issuance model proposed by the company still attracts capital attention. For institutions, in addition to factors such as product feasibility and service stability, whether there are new ways to enter the stablecoin market has also become one of the key factors in evaluation.

Agora Overview

Agora was established in 2023, headquartered in the United States, focusing on providing infrastructure related to stablecoins. The first product, AUSD, adopts a 1:1 minting model, with cash, short-term U.S. Treasury securities, and overnight repurchase agreements as reserve assets. The company’s clients are enterprises and institutions, providing issuance, clearing, and custody capabilities for stablecoins, and does not directly target end users.

In terms of product strategy, Agora has established an issuance framework based on AUSD, allowing partners to issue their own branded stablecoins based on this framework. This method avoids reliance on the Agora brand, enabling partners to retain control over profit distribution and operations. Technically, AUSD supports deployment on mainstream chains such as Ethereum and Solana, with the contract layer implementing various functional extensions, including permission control, signature verification, and privacy transmission.

At the service application layer, Agora provides an exchange channel between AUSD and mainstream stablecoins (USDC, USDT), offering an around-the-clock liquidity interface for certain institutional clients. As of now, the on-chain transaction count of AUSD has exceeded 8 million, with a cumulative transaction volume of over 12 billion dollars, and approximately 55,000 registered users, with over 100 partner institutions. Currently, circulation is primarily on-chain, with usage mainly concentrated in certain decentralized trading platforms and payment scenarios.

From a market positioning perspective, Agora is closer to the Paxos model, focusing on institutional collaboration. However, unlike Paxos, which issues independent stablecoins for its partners, Agora’s partners’ products are all anchored to AUSD and share underlying liquidity. This approach maintains brand independence while also allowing for interchangeability of assets within the network, facilitating liquidity management and technical integration.

Team Background

Agora was co-founded by Nick van Eck, Drake Evans, and Joe McGrady, who respectively serve as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Technology Officer (CTO), and Chief Operating Officer (COO). According to public information, the current company team has fewer than 10 members.

Nick van Eck was a partner at General Catalyst, focusing on investment opportunities in enterprise software and cryptocurrency. He previously worked at JMI Equity, participating in several large transaction projects, and graduated from the University of Virginia.

Drake Evans is responsible for technical architecture and contract development. In the early years, he participated in the construction of modules related to Frax Finance, including projects such as Fraxlend, Fraxswap, and frxETH, with contract peak management assets exceeding 1 billion USD. He previously worked on payment system performance optimization in a team under ADP, possessing relevant experience in compliance system development.

Joe McGrady is responsible for the company’s operations. Before joining Agora, he was the Global Operations Head at Galaxy Digital, where he participated in the organization of trading, lending, asset management, and infrastructure, and was also responsible for the onboarding processes of projects such as Fireblocks. He held key positions at Ospraie Management and its subsidiary ParkRiver, where he worked extensively in institutional due diligence and operations management.

Overall, the team members have backgrounds spanning venture capital, blockchain protocol development, and traditional financial operations, providing the foundational conditions to drive institutional-level products.

Product layout: three main strategic lines

Agora currently builds a service system with three product lines, covering stablecoin issuance, liquidity management, and multi-chain network deployment, attempting to address core issues such as compliance transparency, fund scheduling, and cross-chain usage in the current stablecoin applications.

The first product line is the AUSD stablecoin itself, with its asset reserves primarily consisting of short-term US Treasury bonds and cash, and supervised by a third-party custodial institution, featuring a certain level of transparent disclosure and audit arrangements. This asset structure can meet the regulatory requirements for stablecoin products in some regions and reduce the credit risk arising from the opacity of reserve assets.

The second product line is the “Instant Liquidity” service. Agora has established an exchange mechanism with stablecoins such as USDC and USDT, allowing institutional users to complete asset conversions across multiple chains with low latency. This function is provided through the Atlas interface, aiming to reduce the usage friction caused by liquidity layering while improving the capital utilization efficiency of cross-chain assets.

The third product line is the stablecoin issuance network and white-label platform. Agora supports multi-chain deployment and can bridge partner products to centralized and decentralized trading platforms. Enterprise clients can issue localized stablecoins according to their needs, with the system providing corresponding clearing, custody, and branding support capabilities. This platform structure enhances partner autonomy and also increases the overall network’s adaptability and synergy.

Summary

Against the backdrop of the gradual maturation of the stablecoin market and the increasingly differentiated user demand, capital has begun to focus on the adjustment space of product models and service boundaries. The co-issuance structure adopted by Agora targets enterprise users and institutional scenarios, with a relatively clear focus, reducing direct overlap with leading projects in the terminal market.

The current financing also indicates that the capital market still has an interest in exploring such models, especially against the backdrop of a gradually forming policy framework, where institutions are more inclined to focus on projects with compliance adaptability and expansion potential. For the stablecoin industry, Agora’s attempt provides a possible path that balances standardization and customization, targeting institutions and relying on underlying networks, which may become a reference sample in the future development process of stablecoins.

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