SoundHound has been working on the development of its conversational AI platform for more than a decade. The company has spent more than $40 million in building a dedicated song identification app and a better Siri-like voice assistant for your smartphones. And today, it has been announced that the company has raised $75 Million to continue its innovative ambitions in the AI ecosystem.
The fundraising round has been led by strategic investors including the likes of Nvidia GPU Ventures, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and Nomura Holdings, among others. Other investors (new and existing) who also infused capital during this round are Kleiner Perkins, SharesPost 100 Fund, Global Catalyst Partners, TransLink Capital and others. This round increases the total funds raised by SoundHound to a massive $115 million until date.
Talking about the investment, Keyvan Mohajer, co-founder and CEO of SoundHound Inc. says,
We are at the inflection point of our long-term vision that every product or service needs to have a smart voice-enabled interface, and consumers have increasingly high expectations for this requirement, beyond simple commands or skills.
With this strategic investment, we will bring the power of the proprietary technology behind our independent Houndify platform to even more users globally and amplify the rollout of our Collective AI architecture.
The massive $75 million capital infusion will be strategically utilized towards growth acceleration, investing in the international expansion of their services (particularly to Asia and Europe) and continuing to achieve the vision of Collective AI. This’ll be made possible through the years of experience and technical acumen that has been gathered by the engineering teams at SoundHound. Several strategic investors for the company have also committed to ship products integrated with their Houndify AI platform.
The name, SoundHound, might sound familiar to everyone as it is one of the widely known competitors against Shazam. You could ask the app at any moment of time to identify the music track playing in the background. The application also made use of the company’s patented deep learning tech and has been downloaded nearly 300 million times. But, the company expanded its services beyond music identification to virtual assistance across a mobile device.
Last year in March, the company launched a voice-activated assistant ‘Hound,’ both for Android and iOS users. The primary aim behind the launch of this service was to provide users with an AI assistant that can understand increasingly complex and specific queries. This app has since been employed to not only ask follow-up questions and keeping up the conversation. But, users have started using Hound to question the AI using lengthy questions with multiple data points.
Commenting on their investment, Shankar Chandran, MD and head of Samsung Catalyst Fund, says,
We believe the best innovations occur when ideas are shared through open ecosystems and collaboration. That is at the heart of what the team at SoundHound Inc. is building with their vision of Collective AI, which provides the tools and platform for developers to build more intelligent solutions easily and rapidly.
The California-based company was launched by a trio of co-founders James Hom, Keyvan Mohajer, Majid Emami in 2005. SoundHound is currently investing in building its Houndify platform, which uses the tech inside the Collective AI. This developer platform provides brands with the necessary technology ingredients for building a device powered by the fastest speech recognition technology. This also enables the owners to retain their brand value and modify the usability according to their needs.
Since its launch last year, the Houndify platform has been on-boarded by over 20,000 developers to build their 500+ distinct products. The platform has been utilized not only to power Internet of Things (IoT) or smart appliances. Houndify has also been used by brands to enable users to interact with their vehicles as well. The Collective AI provides developers with the necessary data and integrations, which are being pulled from Yelp, Uber, and Expedia, as well as over 100 other domains.
3 comments
“the company has raised $75 billion”
Are you sure about that?
Hi, thanks for pointing it out. We’ve duly corrected the same.