SoundHound AI in the AI stack

The business and what the filings show

SoundHound AI sells voice AI: conversational assistants built into cars, TVs and other devices, ordering systems for restaurants, and AI agents that handle customer service calls. Over its latest four quarters it reported $203M of revenue, +55% on the year before, at a 42% gross margin and a −69% operating margin. It is the smallest company in the software layer by revenue.

Much of its growth has come from acquisitions: SYNQ3, a restaurant ordering company, in January 2024; Amelia, a conversational AI company for enterprises, in August 2024; and Interactions, which its 10-K calls a pioneer in AI for customer service and workflow orchestration, in September 2025. Acquired revenue lifts reported growth, so the figure to watch is how fast the combined business grows once each deal is a year old.

SoundHound is a pure-play AI application company, the opposite of the incumbents adding AI to existing products. It has to show that voice AI can be sold at a profit when large model providers and the clouds offer speech and conversational models directly. Its gross margin, below most of the layer, and its operating loss show how far it is from that.

How AI shows up in the numbers

For SoundHound, AI is the entire product: its revenue is what customers pay for voice assistants and AI agents. That makes it a direct read on demand for specialist voice AI, and its margins a read on whether a specialist can charge enough over the cost of running models to make a profit.

For scale, SoundHound AI’s revenue over the latest four quarters equals 0% of the $566B the five largest buyers spent on capital projects over their latest four quarters. Their capex rose +81% on the year before, while SoundHound AI’s revenue grew +55%: slower than the spending, so it is capturing a smaller share of each new capex dollar, or more of its business sits outside the build-out.

How it talks about AI

In its latest earnings release, furnished to the SEC on August 5, 2026, SoundHound AI mentioned AI 9 times in 984 words of narrative text, about 9.1 mentions per 1,000 words. Of its 7 sentences about AI, 2 included a number: a revenue figure, a growth rate, a customer count or another measurable result. Across the 8 releases we read, back to November 12, 2024, AI mentions per 1,000 words went from 18.8 to 9.1.

Specific claims are easier to check against the numbers than general enthusiasm, which is why the share of AI sentences that carry a figure is worth watching alongside how often AI is mentioned. The sentences below are quoted from the release as published, after removing safe-harbor text and company boilerplate.

• “SOUNDHOUND Reports Record Q2 and All Time High Revenue of $61.9 million, Up 45%, Raises Full Year Outlook Delivers strong growth with OASYS driving significant enterprise AI adoption; improves all key profitability metrics.”
• “With our Q2 revenue now 10 times what it was when we debuted as a public company in Q2 2022, and enterprise demand for high-ROI voice and agentic AI accelerating globally, our OASYS platform and in-house model innovations position us to lead in the new era of enterprise automation.”
• “Our strong topline growth this quarter was driven by signing major enterprise AI deals attributed to OASYS.”

Source: earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), August 5, 2026.

The trend in the numbers

Since the start of 2023, SoundHound AI’s largest quarter by revenue was Q2 2026 at $62M, and its highest gross margin was 79% in Q2 2023. The latest quarter set the revenue record for the period.

Quarter by quarter, SoundHound AI’s revenue grew +68% in Q3 2025, +59% in Q4 2025, +52% in Q1 2026, +45% in Q2 2026 on the same quarter a year earlier. Growth has been slowing, though from a high base.

Gross margin in the latest quarter was 45%, against 39% a year earlier, so it is keeping more of each dollar as it grows. Operating margin moved from −183% to −70% over the same span. Over the latest four quarters it turned −56% of its revenue into operating cash flow and spent 1% of revenue on capital projects, against 1% a year earlier.

Where it sits in the stack

SoundHound AI sits in the software and applications layer of the AI stack. It sits at the top of the stack, where revenue from end customers has to come from; its own spending flows to AI clouds.

Among the 27 companies in this layer on our map, it ranks number 27 by revenue and number 3 of 27 by revenue growth. Its gross margin of 42% compares with 78% for the layer as a whole, so it keeps less of each dollar than the layer average. The full layer analysis is on the software page.

Latest four quarters for 10-Q filers; latest fiscal year for 20-F filers. Companies under $100 million of revenue are left out.

Against the 27 US-listed companies in its layer, SoundHound AI grew +55% over the latest year versus +19% for the layer combined, and converted −57% of revenue into free cash flow versus 33% for the layer. It is taking share of the layer’s revenue.

What has to go right, and what could go wrong

What has to go right. Restaurants, carmakers and service businesses have to deploy voice AI widely and choose a specialist for it, and SoundHound has to integrate its acquisitions into one business with improving margins.

What could go wrong. If model providers and the clouds make voice AI cheap and easy to build in-house, SoundHound could struggle to keep prices above its costs, and continued losses would make it dependent on raising capital.

These describe the conditions the business depends on, as the filings show them. They are not a view on the stock.

Through the lens of Investing in AI

Rob May’s book offers six mental models for telling AI moats from traps. The one most useful for SoundHound AI’s layer is “AI challenges traditional SaaS assumptions”: Per-seat pricing, zero marginal cost, smooth ARR curves, and automatic land-and-expand break down when software does work on your behalf. The mistake is not using SaaS instincts. It is using them automatically.

The question it asks of any company is: What work is this product actually doing, and how does pricing map to it? Applied to SoundHound AI, the filings on this page are the place to start: the margin trend shows whether it holds scarce value or passes it through, the customer and financing disclosures show who it depends on, and the commitments show what it has promised before the revenue arrives.

Customers and concentration

US companies must disclose any customer that accounts for 10% or more of revenue, and foreign filers usually describe their largest customers. Concentration matters because a company’s growth is only as durable as the handful of buyers behind it, and in the AI stack those buyers are often the same few companies.

• “year ended December 31, 2025, there was no customer that accounted for more than 10% of the Company's total revenues.” 10-K, March 2, 2026

Commitments and backlog

• Backlog. SoundHound AI reports $60M of remaining performance obligations, 0.3 times its revenue over the latest four quarters: contracted revenue not yet earned.

What to watch

SoundHound AI’s next quarterly report will cover the quarter ending around September 29, 2026. Large companies must file a 10-Q within 40 days of a quarter’s end and a 10-K within 60 days of the fiscal year’s end, so the new figures should arrive by about November 28, 2026 at the latest. This page, the layer pages and the next quarterly report all update from that filing.

• Revenue growth once acquisitions are a year old, which separates organic demand from bought revenue.
• Gross margin, which shows whether it can price above the cost of running its models.
• Operating loss as a share of revenue, and the cash it uses.
• Its place in the next quarterly AI Stack Report, which updates every company on the map from the new filings.

Figures from SoundHound AI’s SEC filings, latest period ended June 30, 2026. Other companies: all company pages.