Once upon a time, SoundHound was a music identification app: a rival to Shazam, although not as big – the two had 100 million and 250 million registered users respectively in 2012 as a rough guide. However, SoundHound has spent the years since then evolving into a different beast entirely. It’s now a company focused on voice search and voice-based interfaces, signalled in its Hound app in 2015, but also in B2B partnerships with the likes of Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telekom, Snap and (still a foot in the music sector) Pandora.
Now SoundHound is going public, via a SPAC merger, and claiming a valuation of $2.1bn.
It’s expected to happen in the first quarter of 2022, at which the company will be listed on the Nasdaq exchange as SoundHound AI. You can read its investor presentation here for a snapshot of where the company is at in 2021.
Its core Houndify tech is handling 100m monthly queries, with bold predictions that SoundHound’s net revenues will grow from $20m in 2021 to $939m by 2026. SoundHound never did unseat Shazam as top dog in the music-ID space, but given that Apple reportedly paid $400m for the latter company, if the markets agree that SoundHound is worth more than five times that now, it may have the last laugh.
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