SoundHound Lands $100 Million in Financing as AI Takes Off

SoundHound AI is hoping new financing will help it capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom.

The voice artificial intelligence (AI) company announced Monday (April 17) it had closed a new $125 million loan facility from Atlas Credit Partners with $100 million fully funded at closing.

According to a news release, the transaction fulfills SoundHound’s plan to refinance its debt and solidify its balance sheet, while also accelerating its pace of innovation.

“Recent advances in artificial intelligence, including generative AI and large language models, have catalyzed a wave of breakthroughs that are transforming how humans can converse more naturally and seamlessly with technology,” the company said.

SoundHound says it is poised to “significantly grow” its subscription business with its AI-based customer service offering, which includes products supporting call answering and food ordering for restaurants. It also anticipates ongoing growth in its licensing business, which includes smart devices, TV and automotive tech.

The company last month debuted an app that enables voice interaction with tools like ChatGPT.

The SoundHound Chat AI is a voice assistant that lets brands and their customers access generative AI models by talking.

“SoundHound Chat AI ushers in a new phase of voice-enabled, conversational AI that used to only exist in science fiction,” SoundHound CEO and Co-founder Keyvan Mohajer said in a release. “By combining the power of software engineering and machine learning with generative AI, we can finally deliver the digital assistant experience users have been desiring for decades.”

In a recent interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Mohajer predicted sweeping changes resulting from that advances in voice AI, particularly around improved speech recognition and synergistic integrations with large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT-4.

“[When voice AI first started] consumers wanted to have those sci-fi-style, open-ended conversations [with robots], and many were disappointed because the tools at that time could only play music, set timers, tell you the weather,” Mohajer said.

He added that these “utility occasions” had the downside of making consumers lower their expectations for voice AI applications.

But with digital tools continuing their exponential advance, voice AI solutions can finally provide consumers with the first promising look at a “truly open-ended conversational experience,” PYMNTS wrote last month.