SoundHound

SoundHound AI, Inc. is a voice AI and speech recognition company founded in 2005. It develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition and search technologies. Its featured products include a voice AI developer platform, SoundHound Chat AI, a voice-enabled digital assistant, and music recognition mobile app SoundHound. Key vertical industries include the automotive, IoT devices, restaurant and customer service industries. The company’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.

History
The company was founded in 2005 by Keyvan Mohajer, an Iranian-Canadian computer scientist who had founded a number of dot com ventures before starting SoundHound.

In 2009, the company's Midomi app was rebranded as SoundHound, but is still available as a web version on midomi.com.

In 2015, SoundHound became the first music recognition service shipping in cars, in a partnership with Hyundai, in the new Genesis model.

By May 2016, SoundHound had over 300 million users globally.

In 2018, SoundHound Inc. announced partnerships with Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Honda to provide voice interaction for their products using its Houndify voice AI platform.

SoundHound won the 2020 Webby Award for Productivity (Voice) in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice.

On November 16, 2021, SoundHound announced plans to become a public company via a SPAC merger with Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners Co.

On April 28, 2022, the combined company SoundHound AI, Inc. went public, listed under the symbol SOUN on the Nasdaq.

In 2022, the company terminated 10% of its staff and enforced salary cuts, and it was reported that SoundHound raised less than half of what it originally projected in its SPAC merger deal. In January 2023, the company laid off approximately 50% of its employees, and offered 2 weeks of severance. In April 2023, SoundHound secured $100 million in strategic financing.

In December 2023, SoundHound acquired SYNQ3 Restaurant Solutions, a provider of voice AI for restaurants, for $25 million.

Funding
According to an article of June 2015 SoundHound Inc. had raised a total of $40 million in funding from Global Catalyst Partners, Translink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, and other investors. This included $7 million in a Series B funding round the company secured in October 2008, bringing total funds raised to $12 million at that time. The round was led by TransLink Capital with the participation of JAIC America and Series A investor Global Catalyst Partners. In 2009 it attracted additional funding from Larry Marcus at Walden Venture Capital, who had previously invested in music startups Pandora and Snocap. The $4 million funding round was led by Walden Venture Capital VII, with the participation of an unnamed device manufacturer.

In January 2017, the company raised another $75 million in an investment round that included Nvidia, Samsung, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and others.

As of January 2018, the valuation of the company had reached $1 billion. Announced in May 2018, SoundHound raised $100 million from a funding round led by Tencent and joined by Daimler AG, Hyundai Motors, Midea Group, and Orange S.A.

In November 2021, Soundhound first announced the merger with Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners Co to go public with $2.1B valuation, with $111 million of investments from Oracle, Qatar First Bank, Koch Industries, and MKaNN Ventures, Cota Capital, VIZIO, HTC, FIH Mobile (a Foxconn Technology Group company), and others. The transaction closed in April 2022.