SoundHound has developed an independent voice AI platform that allows businesses across industries to integrate intelligent conversational voice assistants into their products. SoundHound’s innovations include Speech-to-Meaning and Deep Meaning Understanding technologies that process speech in one step with speed and accuracy, allowing people to interact with products and services the same way they do with each other — by simply talking.
Adoption of voice AI is rapidly expanding, with the market opportunity expected to reach $160 billion by 2026. Businesses across industries are realizing that voice is the next frontier for their brands in the digital age and are adopting voice AI to deliver differentiated user experiences.
SoundHound’s technology powers the voice experience in millions of products from leading global brands, including Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Pandora, Mastercard, Deutsche Telekom, Snap, VIZIO, KIA, Stellantis, and more. SoundHound processes over 100 million queries per month across the company’s ecosystem of product partnerships. Query volume doubled in the first half of 2021 and is projected to exceed 1 billion by the end of the year.
"We believe voice AI is poised to create the next major disruption in computing. Companies across industries recognize that voice AI is essential to customer retention, brand loyalty, market competitiveness, and future success. The growing demand for those companies to own their customer relationships and data have positioned SoundHound as a leading solution for voice assistants globally," states Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and Co-Founder, SoundHound Inc. "This transaction will accelerate our mission to voice-enable the world with conversational intelligence."
SoundHound’s leading-edge technology has been developed over the last 16 years and includes 227 patents granted or pending with solutions available across cloud-only, embedded-only, and hybrid connectivity. The technology is available in 22 languages, with additional languages planned in the near future. The company’s developer platform, Houndify, gives clients access to dashboards and development tools to analyze customer usage and behavior and better optimize the voice experience of their products.
SoundHound’s technology can address complex user queries such as, "Show me all restaurants within half a mile of the Space Needle that are open past 9pm on Wednesdays and have outdoor seating,” and follow-on qualifications such as "Okay, don't show me anything with less than 3 stars or fast food."
The SoundHound developer platform, Houndify, is an open-access platform that allows developers to leverage SoundHound’s voice AI technology and a library of over 100 content domains, including commonly used domains for points of interest, weather, flight status, sports, and more. Houndify’s Collective AI is an architecture for connecting domain knowledge that encourages collaboration and contribution among developers, is always learning, and is greater than the sum of its parts — ensuring the platform continues to become smarter as it grows.
"Much like Apple disrupted and revolutionized human-machine interaction via the perfection of touch, SoundHound is poised to disrupt and revolutionize human-machine interaction via voice. SoundHound, with its breakthrough natural language technology and Collective AI approach, as well as its status as an independent voice AI provider, enables device makers around the world to incorporate conversational AI into their products and join a growing voice AI ecosystem, all while retaining full control of their brand. SoundHound is being embraced by an ever-increasing list of industry-leading clients, partners and investors and Archimedes is proud and thrilled to be the one to bring SoundHound to the public market," says Eric Ball, Chairman of Archimedes.
Following completion of the transaction, SoundHound will retain its experienced management team, which includes Keyvan Mohajer (Founder & CEO), Majid Emami (Co-Founder & VP of Engineering), James Hom (Co-Founder & VP of Products), Michael Zagorsek (COO), Nitesh Sharan (CFO), Tim Stonehocker (CTO), Kamyar Mohajer (VP Corporate Strategy & Expansion), Amir Arbabi (VP Business Development), Angeline Tucker (VP People & Culture), Warren Heit (VP Legal & General Counsel), and Lisa Flattery (VP Marketing).
In 2005, SoundHound’s founders, a group of Stanford graduates, embarked on a journey to build the capability for people to have conversational interactions with machines. They first developed an approach to sound recognition that led to a music recognition mobile app which has received over 315 million downloads worldwide. Over the next 10 years, the SoundHound team worked on a fundamentally new technology to revolutionize human-to-device voice interaction. In 2015, SoundHound unveiled its voice AI platform to the world. By combining the two-step process of converting speech-to-text and then text-to-speech into a single step with its Speech-to-Meaning technology, SoundHound opened up the possibility for businesses to build custom voice assistants.
Today, voice assistants are becoming ubiquitous. Universal adoption of voice interfaces has created an imperative for companies of all sizes across industries. In response, leading companies, including automotive OEMs, consumer electronics, streaming services, telecom companies, and financial services organizations have turned to SoundHound to help them create an interactive voice experience.
Prior to today’s announcement, SoundHound has already created an unprecedented industry alliance with over $280 million of prior investments from Hyundai, Daimler AG / Mercedes-Benz, Samsung, Tencent, NVIDIA, Orange, Korea Telecom, Nomura, Midea, Naver, Line, Cota Capital, Sompo Japan, Walden VC, Kleiner Perkins, Translink Capital, The Private Shares Fund, Global Catalyst Partners, and more.
The transaction is expected to deliver up to $244 million of gross proceeds, including the contribution of up to $133 million of cash held in Archimedes’ trust account, subject to redemptions by Archimedes subunit holders. Of such amount, $111 million will come from fully-committed common equity PIPE that is priced at $10.00 per share and is anchored by Oracle, Koch Industries, and MKaNN Ventures as well as investments by Cota Capital, VIZIO, HTC, FIH Mobile (a Foxconn Technology Group company), Structural Capital, Provco Group, Sompo, Pejman Nozad, and others.
All cash remaining on Archimedes’ balance sheet at the closing of the transaction, after paying off transaction expenses, is expected to remain on SoundHound AI, Inc.’s balance sheet for working capital, growth capex, and other general corporate purposes.
The Board of Directors of SoundHound and Archimedes, respectively, have approved the transaction. The transaction will require the approval of the stockholders of Archimedes and SoundHound, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022. As part of the transaction, the outstanding equity of SoundHound will be converted into equity of the combined company.
www.soundhound.com
www.archimedesspac.com
