SoundHound AI, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to SoundHound Quarter 1, 2026 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 a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Scott Smith, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our first quarter 2026 conference call. With me today is our CEO and co-founder, Kayvon Mahajer, our CFO and co-founder, James Hom, and our COO, Mike Sigorsek. 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 a discussion of the 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 websites. and audio replay will be available following today's call. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO, Kevan Mahajer. Please go ahead, Kevan.

Thank you, Scott, and thank you, everyone, for joining the call today. Sanhans started the year strong with top-line growth exceeding 50%, and excluding the impact of all acquisitions, our automotive and IoT AI business was up 88% year over year. Overall, we are seeing increased demand for our AI and our enterprise solutions, and this is reflected in the massive pipeline we continue to build. Two weeks ago, we announced we entered into a definitive agreement for the acquisition of LivePerson, a digital messaging pioneer and a leader in the conversational AI space, serving hundreds of enterprise and mid-market customers. The combined company will work with enterprise customers across more than 30 countries, including 12 of the top 15 global banks, four of the top five global airlines, four of the top five global automakers, and 10 leading global telecommunications providers. This accumulative customer base includes 25 of the Fortune 100 companies. We expect the deal to close in the second half of the year, marking our fifth strategy acquisition, while continuing a disciplined and deliberate approach to developing a full-service enterprise AI business. With the addition of LivePerson, Stanham will have over 120 years of combined customer relationships and enterprise integrations, as well as data from tens of billions of real-world interactions. We now have a proven track record when it comes to M&A, a repeatable formula of turning pre-merger decline to post-merger growth by taking complementary business models and technology stacks and integrating them with Sanha's own to emerge together as a formidable force in conversational and agentic AI. Our first acquisition has undergone a complete turnaround in under two years and is on the path of continuous growth. And while we are less than 12 months into our latest acquisition, we are already seeing an acceleration in that pace with this portion of our business getting its Q1 revenue forecast. Our process is getting faster and more efficient, and we are ready to deliver another success story with live persons. With all of these companies, we've identified a common thread to bring success and a substantial return on investment for our stakeholders. They are great businesses. Each one has amazing teams, incredible solutions, and has built strong customer relationships. In each case, synergies with our highly focused pillars of our business were clear, and Sanhan was able to give them the resources and the collaboration they needed to thrive. We believe that LivePerson can be a transformational turnaround opportunity. Upon closing the acquisition, TanHan will immediately seek to address the three critical areas required by their customers. First is strengthening their financial status. Second is accelerating the modernization of their platform. And third is delivering faster innovation. In addition, one of the most frequently requested capabilities from live-person customer base is voice AI, which TanHan can offer immediately. By offering Samhan Voice AI to live-person customers and the unified digital and voice omni-channel solutions to Samhan customers, we believe the combined business is expected to reach $500 million based on the existing customer base alone. And with all of our combined businesses, we continue to harvest cost synergies and revenue synergies with cross-selling and opto-link. While acquisition is not a requirement for our success, it provides a strategic opportunity for Samhan to accelerate the expansion of our customer base bring advanced and additive capabilities to our platform, and to further scale and accelerate the trajectory of our leadership position. Moves like this are a key piece of a much larger vision for SoundHound, and turning specifically to the technical synergies arising from our acquisitions, I want to comment on our big news earlier in the week. For those who may have missed the headlines, on Tuesday we officially announced Oasis, our orchestrated agent system. This category-leading platform breaks away from old, static build-and-deploy models that require businesses to dedicate considerable resources to constant, time-consuming maintenance. With OASIS, AI itself can build entire fleets of AI agents in minutes based on existing documentation and integrations, and those agents will autonomously and continuously refine themselves. What once took businesses months can now take just minutes, significantly lower their operational costs. Like the human brain, OASIS continues to get better the more it is used and is intelligent enough to take the initiatives, evaluating performance gaps and then proactively suggesting and building fixes for its human operators to approve. But OASIS isn't just about efficiency gains. It's also about opportunity. A business can use the platform to build an AI agent once and deploy it anywhere, across phone, text, web chats, in-store cleanups, social media, TVs, and in-vehicles. The channel diversity Sanhain offers is unmatched by competitors in the space and will truly allow brands to redefine where and how they interact with their customers. This is truly a platform built for a new era. AI agents will traverse digital and physical spaces, handling complex customer contact center inquiries, reducing the need for human escalation enhanced by continuously improving AI agents trained on historical data and built by AI. managing workflows like prescription refills or IT service requests, offering real-time assistance to employees on the retail sales floor, executing transactions in the vehicle like ordering coffee on the road, providing outbound customer outreach with personalized offers and incentives based on the customer data, handling orders in high-volume sales environments like the drive-thru, and solving disputes for customer service contact centers, turning complaints into opportunities. OASIS is a platform that unites TAMR core technology with the collective strength of our various acquisitions to deliver one unified engine. This marks an important evolution for who we are as a business, moving to a single, powerful, agentic AI ecosystem. OASIS serves as the orchestration and intelligence layer that allows our customers to move beyond deploying individual TAMR products toward a more integrated and user-friendly experience. To understand how powerful this new platform will be for businesses, it's helpful to understand the kind of ROI our current platform is delivering for global enterprise clients. One Fortune 100 insurance company was able to achieve over $10 million in quarterly labor savings. For that same customer, our AI successfully served over 21 million customers, fully automating a significant portion of those interactions, while maintaining over 96% routing accuracy. Additionally, our agents processed over 1 million financial transactions and generated more than $5 million in savings to enhance customer self-service. Unsurprisingly, this customer has already been testing our new OASIS platform in beta, alongside a number of our large enterprise customers. As another example of undeniable value creation, one of our QSR customers conducted a careful analysis and reported that drive-through locations deploying our voice AI solutions are generating greater revenue than comparable locations that don't use handheld technology. Our AI is functioning as a powerful efficiency tool for operators and their employees, allowing them to deliver fast, accurate service, a vital advantage in today's challenging macroeconomic environment where the every transaction matters. You can see we are driving measurable value for our clients and their end users alike. While our acquisitions have provided the opportunity for significant cost synergies, I also want to talk about where we are making the right and responsible investments. Oasis will be powered by Polaris, SoundHunt's own speech foundation model that consistently beats big tech competitors in accuracy and performance by a large margin. We now see further opportunity to take our foundation model to the next level and include specialized LLMs and speech synthesis with a level of quality beyond state of the art. As a result, OASIS at runtime does not need to depend on any third-party frontier models. Every interaction can be powered by Sanhan's own models, giving us higher quality, more control, and significant cost savings. Of course, when necessary or required by a customer, OASIS can orchestrate across any model, and our customers can continue to have the benefit of flexibility. But we expect, for the majority of cases, OASIS will utilize Sanhan's own models. This is the right time for us to be making this investment for the following reasons. First, due to our years of R&D and data accumulation, this is a contained and responsible investment. Unlike some companies that are throwing billions to avoid missing out, we know what we are doing. We know our training recipes, we have the data, and our models will be specialized for what they will be used for. Importantly, we believe that models that handle the customer service inquiry don't need to also solve quantum physics problems or answer history questions in Haiku. We will create models that have the right parameters to outperform the frontier models at a lower cost for their target applications, like resolving customer queries, processing orders, refilling prescriptions, or executing card transactions. Second, we have reached a scale that makes this investment a clear winner. Most of the traffic from our various acquisitions migrates to Oasis and upgrades to Agentage. The cost saving of avoiding frontier models at runtime will be far more than the investment to create its independence within a short span of time. This is a contained and calculated investment expected to be less than 1% of our market cap this year and time-bounded. We expect it will pay off by an order of magnitude in cost saving for SoundHound and even more so in value creation as it will elevate SoundHound's standing as a pure play AI company with a full stack of models for the growing number of industries we serve. That brings me to Q1, which saw a number of strong deals across a number of those industries. Across automotive and IoT, we signed a new seven-figure commitment with a prominent Japanese auto manufacturer to deploy our voice assistant across vehicles globally. We also expanded into South America with a prominent multinational OEM and signed an agreement to integrate Samhain Voice AI into Walmart's TV brand ONN. And we continue to make progress with voice commerce as multiple TV and well-known automotive brands integrate our first-of-its-kind solution. Q1 also saw strong traction across large restaurants, retail, and consumer brands. A major QSR reported growing ROI from SoundHands drive-thru technology with AI-enabled locations consistently generating more revenue than those without our AI technology. Also in restaurants, we are seeing an increase in cross-bill wins and a strong object in the adoption of Samhain's Voice Insight product, which provides operators with deep and valuable analysis of customer interactions and staff responses. In consumer enterprise, we've now deployed AI solutions with three major global fitness apparel brands, representing the majority of market share in that category. And in retail, we signed deals with a national residential and commercial service company, a large streaming school, and multiple boutique fitness chains, with a total opportunity to deploy our AI solutions in approximately 1,600 locations. We also signed deals across a diverse number of verticals, such as banking, financial services, insurance, utilities, energy, telecommunications, healthcare, pharmaceutical, life sciences, technology, software, and IT services. They included one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S. and a Fortune 100 company, representing an age-bigger deal. one of the world's largest banks that serve millions of customers in over 100 global markets, one of the largest technology companies in the world expanding services into Europe, a New York-based global financial services platform company, an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Denver, Colorado, a multinational conglomerate that offers a number of products and services across its multiple business groups, a top 10 U.S. credit union, a major insurance corporation headquartered in Texas and operating in all 50 states. Two electricity providers headquartered in Texas and Kansas, respectively, both serving residential and business customers. A large telecommunications provider supporting customers in 25 states. A specialized U.S. healthcare organization operating in multiple states. Align Our Health, a healthcare provider with over 90 clinics, 12 hospital campuses, and 13 retail pharmacies. A large U.S.-based healthcare network specializing in medical, surgical, and cosmetic dermatology operating across 14 states in over 150 locations. A Japanese multinational company operating across sectors including energy, digital systems, mobility, and industrial infrastructure. And with our 10 partners, we continue to expand our ecosystem. We announced a breakthrough partnership with Manpower Group, working with them on their strategy to bring AI agent capabilities to market. We agreed to a partnership with an American multinational corporation that designs, builds, and manages infrastructure services. And we added new business with the following. A leading global IT services and consulting company providing digital transformation, AI, and cloud computing solutions. One of the largest information technology services and consulting companies in the world, headquartered in France. And a Japanese headquartered company that offers IT services system integration, cloud computing, and information security. In short, we are seeing great traction because our technology is delivering real value across a wide range of protocols. And with the planned acquisition of LivePerson, we expect our customer base to expand further. LivePerson brings hundreds of long-tenured enterprise relationships, many spanning over a decade, adding to our expanding customer roster, which includes thousands of restaurants, leading global automakers, and enterprise customers across financial services, healthcare, insurance, energy, and retail. Combined with LivePerson, we will have one of the most comprehensive customer footprints in the conversational AI sector. In closing, we had a strong start to 2026. This is happening because our disruptive technology, breakthrough innovation, and hyper-responsiveness to customers is resonating, and we continue to scale across our broadening enterprise portfolio. We are growing our top line. We are making the right investments with clear ROI while exploring cost synergies. We are innovating faster than ever. And most importantly, we are giving our customers what they want, thanks to our years of experience, relationships, integrations, and data. We are excited about the planned acquisition of LivePerson and the synergies that the two companies can bring to market. The momentum in our space continues to accelerate. And we are being proactive and leading the charge to go after further market share gains. With that, I'll now turn the call over to my co-founder, James, to talk about our financial performance, key growth drivers, and business outlook.