SoundHound Goes Public on Nasdaq Following SPAC Merger
SoundHound AI began trading on Nasdaq Thursday as SOUN after completing a merger valuing the company at $2.1 billion with special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners Co. The stock began at $8.72 a share and is fluctuating between about $8.50 and a high of $10.49 as of publication.
Public SoundHound
SoundHound is best known for its Houndify platform, which provides some or all of the voice AI services for companies worldwide. Houndify to provide voice interactions. Houndify supports an automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU) engine to converse with users and respond appropriately. Houndify’s popularity has grown out of its ability to mimic human conversation. It supports voice assistants capable of understanding complicated requests using casual vocabulary, even when there are multiple commands in a single sentence. More than one billion questions were posed to the platform last year, according to the company.
This year has seen it widen its scope. The company inked a new deal to handle voice AI for Vizio smart televisions, as well partnering with Netflix to add a Houndify-powered voice assistant into the streaming service’s Da Vinci Reference Design Kit (RDK). It’s also deepened existing relationships, like extending its work with Snap to do automatic captioning and with Qualcomm to embed its tech on Snapdragon chips. SoundHound decided to go public to maintain and build on its momentum, with the initial merger providing more cash for its plans to scale the business
“Entering the public markets is a huge milestone for SoundHound and I am incredibly proud of our team and what we’ve accomplished together,” SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer said in a statement. “It is also an important milestone in the voice AI industry that an independent voice platform like ours can be a disruptor and provide more choice to businesses that want to enhance their customer experience with voice. Becoming a public company opens the door for expanded opportunities and to work with customers and partners across industries to continue our mission to voice-enable the world around us.”
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