SoundHound AI, Inc.

Hello, and welcome to SoundHound fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask the question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. I would now like to turn the conference over to Scott Smith, Sir, you may begin.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our fourth quarter 2024 conference call. With me today is our CEO, Kayvon Mahajer, and our CFO, Nitesh Charan. We'll begin with some short remarks before moving to Q&A. We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll be making forward-looking statements on this call. Actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our forward-looking statements. Please refer to our filings with the SEC for a detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could affect our business and for discussion statements that qualify as forward-looking statements. In addition, we may discuss certain non-GAAP measures. Please refer to today's press release for more detailed financial results and further details on the definitions, limitations, and uses of those measures and reconciliations from GAAP to non-GAAP. Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Finally, this call is being audio webcast in its entirety on our Investor Relations website. An audio replay will be available following today's call. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Kayvon Mahajer. Please go ahead, Kayvon.

Thank you, Scott, and thank you to everyone for joining the call today. We had our strongest quarter on record with $35 million in revenue, representing an increase of over 100% year-over-year. With that, we reached the top end of our revenue guidance range for the full year, which we raised just last quarter This speaks to the continued acceleration of our business. In fact, in the last five years, we have grown our top line at a compound annual growth rate of more than 50%. And since going public less than three years ago, we have achieved significant growth in numerous key metrics. Revenue increased by eight times, queries increased by seven times, and bookings increased by five times. But the success we are achieving today didn't start three years ago. It began 20 years ago with a vision that is now becoming a reality. We made bold predictions early on and stayed committed to the path we envisioned. We built an enterprise-grade platform that powers some of the world's largest organizations. This laid the foundation for us to capitalize on the fast-growing voice AI market. Our ability to innovate at a rapid pace and maintain the agility of a pure play high growth disruptor allows us to deliver cutting edge solutions with speed, accuracy, and reliability. We are incredibly excited that we recently unveiled the third pillar of our business, our voice commerce ecosystem. SoundHound has pioneered this vision for years and the concept is simple yet powerful. The users of products powered by our voice assistant, our pillar one, can transact with businesses that are powered by our AI customer service offering, our Pillar 2. This forms the foundation of Samham's three pillar business strategy, and we expect it will increase our momentum further. At CES, we demonstrated the complete end-to-end experience of a driver discovering food options and placing an order via their in-vehicle voice assistant using natural speech. This ecosystem creates value for all stakeholders, For the end user, it enhances convenience and safety. For merchants, it delivers new leads and it creates a monetizable moment for SoundHound with revenue sharing opportunities for the OEMs. The traction we received could not have been better. Within just a few weeks, two notable Japanese automakers are pursuing POCs. Two German automakers are pursuing POCs. Several other notable OEMs in the U.S. and Korea are pursuing POCs. and multiple national chain restaurants are eager to be participating merchants, which will add to our existing portfolio of prominent brands. We expect this concept to create a flywheel effect for SoundHound, with more OEMs and device makers adopting our voice assistant, and more businesses adopting our AI customer service. Let me share more highlights and business wins. In automotive, our pipeline has never been this strong. We are in more and more RFPs and POCs with new logos, including some of the largest automotive brands in the world. We have won four EV brands, including Lucid and TOG, and our existing customers are upgrading to Sanran Chat AI Automotive with Generative AI for additional royalties per unit. In healthcare, we had a very strong quarter, landing four notable wins, including Duke Health, Englewood Health, and WellStar Health System. We are especially excited since we are seeing strong repeatable business in this industry. In restaurants, Burger King, one of the largest QSRs in the world, went live in the UK. We also saw expansions and wins with Whataburger, Pete's Coffee, Torchy's Tacos, Churchill's Texas Chicken, among others. We continue our expansion in four out of the top five pizza brands. We believe the pace of adoption of AI customer service in restaurants is increasing, with Samhain already being the largest provider with dozens of prominent brands and well over 10,000 locations. In government and military, we signed a contract with the City of Coral Springs and continue to roll out our conversational AI capabilities with federal government agencies, such as a branch of the U.S. military, together with General Dynamics. In retail, we are expanding our reach across multi-location retail brands in clothing, fitness, vehicle maintenance, home services, waste management, and more. Some of our customers include Turret, multiple Planet Fitness franchise groups, and MyGem, among others. Our largest deal in Q4 was in energy. We were happy to add a new industry to our portfolio this quarter and signed with one of the largest electric utilities in the United States. We also recently announced a partnership with ReCore, a leader in state-of-the-art roadway intelligence technology, to develop a first-of-its-kind audiovisual AI to bring hands-free voice control to emergency vehicle technology. Moving to agentic AI. SoundHound is a leader in enterprise conversational AI, and our scale as a pure-play AI software company positions us at the forefront of the agentic AI revolution. With our proven conversational AI platform, deep AI expertise, and AI-driven customer service solutions already embedded into hundreds of enterprise brands across industries, we are uniquely equipped to drive this next wave of innovation and capture this growing market opportunity. Agentic AI is widely discussed, but many are still defining what it means and how it will be applied. At its core, agentic AI is a network of autonomous agents working together to achieve complex goals and execute actions. Each agent operates independently. They make decisions, execute tasks, and collaborate to optimize performance. When a user sets a goal, the system intelligently identifies the necessary steps, orchestrates them in sequence, and applies reasoning to deliver the best outcome. This shift allows businesses to focus on defining objectives, while AI handles the execution, unlocking new capabilities and efficiencies. We believe the world is transforming from an ecosystem of APIs to an ecosystem of agents. Agentic AI introduces a new dimension to our platform, expanding its capabilities and impact. It is an inevitable evolution in AI functionality for our customers. This evolution comes as AI adoption moves from experimentation to necessity. Businesses are rapidly embracing AI, and as they do, SoundHound is in a position of strength. We have seen exciting results in the agentic AI tools we've created and are building and testing agentic use cases in every major vertical. We will bring these to commercial deployment soon, and this will be a game changer for our customers and the industry. More to come in the near future. I'm also pleased to share that Sanon had a strong presence at CES, where we showcased groundbreaking technologies and AI solutions in our first ever booth at the show. The buzz around our booth was electric, with non-stop traffic from industry leaders and innovators eager to come and demo our latest advancements. In addition to unveiling the first-ever in-vehicle voice commerce ecosystem, our CES participation also featured collaborations with NVIDIA, Perplexity, Lucid Motors, LG, and a broad range of restaurant partners. These partnerships highlight our leadership in delivering innovative voice solutions that are transforming customer experiences across industries. In addition, SoundHunt was featured in NVIDIA's Partnered Passport Program at CES. Across the event, select partners were chosen to present their innovative work with NVIDIA, and we were honored to demonstrate our voice AI work with them. This collaboration continues with our upcoming participation at NVIDIA GCC 2025. where we'll be showcasing demos of our voice assistant, leveraging generative AI on the edge with NVIDIA Drive AGX, as well as our voice commerce ecosystem. We look forward to bringing more exciting updates and demos to GTC this year. Previously, I had talked about opportunities with Polaris, our multimodal multilingual foundation model. Let me share some of the impressive results of this groundbreaking technology. We compare ourselves against all the major players and prominent benchmarks, both public and private. We do this in different real-world settings, high-noise environments, and in settings where speed and low latency are critical. We know that humans don't speak uniformly, so we consider accents and background disruptions. The results have been amazing. Against Google, for example, we outperformed by north of 20% better accuracy. We also beat them on speed with four times better latency. Against OpenAI's Whisper model, we are 26% to 36% more accurate on various benchmarks. And we are able to do this on models one-tenth of the size of what OpenAI uses. This is because of our ability to balance the right portions of data science and machine learning. And we continue to innovate to keep extending our lead. This is exciting technology. And as more customers begin to adopt it, the power of our AI only gains more interest in the market, positioning us as a leader in innovation and performance. Our ongoing advancements strengthen our competitive edge, driving further interest and accelerating our growth in the market. In closing, it's becoming increasingly clear that the AI revolution we predicted is now here. We are seeing strong growth, our customers love our solutions, and our entire ecosystem is expanding rapidly. Within Automotive and Pillar 1, we continue to add new logos, including with the EDs. Thanks to our innovations, such as SoundHand Chat AI Automotive and our newly unveiled voice commerce ecosystem, we are seeing massive interest. In Pillar 2, across customer service, we are gaining momentum with drive-thru and phone ordering rollouts for major QSR brands. We are excited to have just announced our breakthrough dynamic drive-thru platform that extends the restaurant ordering experience into calling, texting, scanning, and directly into cars. Our AI agents are seeing strong adoption across SMBs, regional chains, and enterprise brands. We've brought meaningful depth and breadth to conversational AI capabilities, along with a diverse range of verticals. And with the acceleration of our agentic AI capabilities, our customer service offering will continue to see accelerated growth. We are proud to have introduced our third pillar voice commerce last month, fulfilling our vision of merging products and customer service into a powerful new product offering. We have a winning position in all pillars of our business. As we bring another successful year to a close, I want to express my sincere gratitude to all SanHan employees for their exceptional achievements and contributions in making this all possible. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Nitesh to talk about our financial performance, key growth drivers, and Business Outlook.