SoundHound


SoundHound Inc. is an audio and speech recognition company founded in 2005. It develops voice-recognition, natural language understanding, sound-recognition and search technologies. Its featured products include Houndify, a Voice AI developer platform, Hound, a voice-enabled digital assistant, and music recognition mobile app SoundHound. The company’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California. SoundHound won the 2020 Webby Award for Productivity in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice.

History

The company was founded in 2005 by Keyvan Mohajer, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford studying speech recognition. In 2009, the company's Midomi app was rebranded as SoundHound. In 2012, SoundHound announced it had over 100 million users globally. In 2014, SoundHound became the first music-search product available as a wearable. Later, SoundHound became the first music recognition service shipping in autos, in a partnership with Hyundai, in the new 2015 Genesis. By May 2016, SoundHound had over 300 million users globally. In 2018, SoundHound Inc. announced partnerships with Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Honda to provide voice interaction for their products using its Houndify voice AI platform.

Funding

According to an article of June 2015 SoundHound Inc. had raised a total of $40 million in funding from Global Catalyst Partners, Translink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, and other investors. This included $7 million in a Series B funding round the company secured in October 2008, bringing total funds raised to $12 million at this time. The round was led by TransLink Capital with the participation of JAIC America and Series A investor Global Catalyst Partners. In 2009 it attracted additional funding from Larry Marcus at Walden Venture Capital, who had previously invested in music startups Pandora and Snocap. The $4 million funding round was led by Walden Venture Capital VII, with the participation of an unnamed device manufacturer.
In January 2017, the company raised another $75 million in an investment round that included Nvidia, Samsung, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and others.
Announced in May 2018, SoundHound raised $100 million from a funding round led by Tencent and joined by Daimler AG, Hyundai Motors, Midea Group, and Orange S.A.
With this funding, the valuation of the company reached $1 billion.