Welcome to FinTech TV.
I'm JD Durkin.
Magnificent 7 earnings season showing big tech continuing the trend that we've seen for several years here now on Wall Street, a significant commitment to artificial intelligence capex spending.
However, many of the companies involved in the AI race like Amazon and Tesla, they're multidimensional, but they're not solely focused on the groundbreaking technology.
AI analysts feel that leaves room for AI startups or pure plays, companies entirely focused on AI in order to better capture significant market share.
Soundhound AI is a small cap company making a lot of noise.
Its size in the AI race.
The Voice AI company posting a Q2 earnings beat, but the company's leader calling it the strongest quarter ever.
Joining me now to break down the report is that leader.
Kevon Mohajer is the CEO of Soundhound AI.
Thanks a lot for being here and congratulations on the big beat for the quarter.
Thank you for having me.
We had our, we had a blowout quarter.
Our strongest quarter on record, revenue is up more than 3 times, and every business unit delivers success for us.
We had strong growth in AI for automotive, strong growth in AI for restaurants, AI for enterprises, and we had new deals.
We had cross across business units.
We also made great progress on voice commerce, which is something we demonstrated earlier this year.
What went so well for you and the company in Q2?
You know, we just closed a lot of these on our pipeline.
It was like better than expected.
There's a lot of demand for AI.
I think we are at an inflection point for AI adoption in enterprises.
It used to be that a lot of companies were hesitant to adopt AI or maybe they were looking at innovation budgets.
Experiment with things, but now there's a mandate for AI transformation for a lot of enterprises, and San is a great partner to help them through that transformation.
For any of our viewers who might be a bit unfamiliar with your core product, talk to me a bit about the history of the company, especially as a publicly traded company.
Yeah, Sanhan is a voice and conversational AI company.
We specialize in speech recognition, natural language understanding.
I was a cofounder starting a dorm room at Stanford 20 years ago.
We had this vision that computers will become better than humans in that understanding, and we wanted to be a part of that transformation.
We spent 10 years in R&D and we built our own technology.
We have our own foundation model that beats the accuracy and speed of a lot of the.
The peers, including the big tech.
Yeah, you've been involved with this space now for quite some time, better part of several decades.
I love talking with founders and co-founders in your position about learned lessons.
Anything you wish you had learned earlier in your founder's journey now that undoubtedly you've learned a lot after the many years of doing this.
Well, you need to have a passion for this.
It's a really, you know, hard, long journey, so you have to really enjoy it.
If you ask for advice, I say.
Um, you know, in the early days people gave me a lot of people gave me advice, and I learned that you need to seek advice, but you need to only follow the advice that you understand and believe in yourself, and that really puts you on the run like that.
What have recent strategic partnerships looked like?
We talk a lot about the general mergers and acquisitions based here on Wall Street.
I'm sure these are a lot of conversations that you've had for your company.
Expand on some of those deals that you've made even over the course of just the last year or two.
Uh yeah, so we believe this is the time for us to do more, you know, what got us here was focus.
We focused on having the best conversational AI for enterprises and devices, and now we need to do more because everyone is every industry is adopting it.
So a way to accelerate our path to new industries is through smart acquisitions and strategic partnerships.
What most excites you about where this technology is today?
Well, the vision we had 20 years ago has been a sheets.
We thought one day computers will be better than humans in language understanding, and until a few years ago that wasn't the case.
You talk to other humans having complex conversations, but when you talk to your assistants, maybe on your phone, on your devices, you kind of had to dumb yourself down to the level, to the level.
You maybe ask very simple questions, set a timer, play music, how's the weather, but now you can actually ask more complicated questions to the AI than a human can understand.
I wonder the flip side of that question what most overwhelms you about where the technology is today, if anything?
Well, first of all, the opportunity is so massive that the potential is unlimited and just being able to capture the mind share and Grab the enterprise's attention is something that is both exciting and overwhelming at times.
Yeah, absolutely.
What is one reality of the space that your company is operating in, especially as the AI underlying technology is changing seemingly by the minute?
One reality of the world that your company is in that you want more people to pay attention to?
Yeah, one thing I've learned is that our customers.
They don't want a vendor.
They want a partner because a lot of businesses that have been focused on their own business for a long time now they need to go through their AI transformation, and they just, they don't want an API with its bunch of documentation and say, you know, if somebody says good luck to them.
They want a partner to sit with them, to listen to them, to help them innovate, to help them solve their problems, and we are really focusing on that.
Sanhan is a partner of choice for a lot of enterprises that want to go through their AI transformation.
Just take a bit of a step back and just to kind of pick your brain with regards to your long running AI expertise.
What do you make of the current arms race?
That we're seeing among the biggest players in the AI game.
Again, knowing that the headlines are changing by the day.
There's a new CEP GPT announcement just in the last 24 hours.
It really feels like we're in an era where you wait 5 minutes and the AI related headlines are going to shift just that much.
How, how do you approach, uh, looking at the big picture of the technology evolution?
Well, I think we are just at the beginning of it, and analogies are good in this case.
So in the mobile era there was a battle of operating systems.
Mobile offer systems maybe lasted for 1 to 3 years, and then there was a decade or more of apps and apps and apps on the operating systems.
And maybe right now you're seeing the battle of foundation models or the giants trying to have the bigger models, but the next phase is going to be applications, applications, applications of these AIs and how the businesses are transformed.
Unfortunately Sanjan is a pioneering bank.
Yeah, the stocks got a really notable gap up here after your last quarterly earnings.
Talk to me about expectations or any guidance that you and the company are projecting here for the upcoming quarter and maybe the rest of 2025.
Well, obviously the, the quarter future was great and we have.
Our guidance for the year.
We feel very confident about our trajectory and we're also expecting to finish the year on an adjusted EB deposit on a go forward basis.
All right, congratulations on the huge quarter.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to stop by the New York Stock Exchange.
Kevon Mohaj is the CEO of Soundhound AI.
Kevon, thanks a lot.
Thanks so much.
