SoundHound

SoundHound Inc.
Privately held company
Industry Speech Recognition / Mobile Technology
Founded September 2005 (2005-09)
Headquarters Santa Clara, CA, United States
Products SoundHound, Hound, Houndify
Number of employees
 246
Website www.soundhound.com

SoundHound Inc., founded in 2005, is an audio and speech recognition company. It develops voice-recognition, natural language understanding, sound-recognition and search technologies. Its feature products are Houndify (voice-AI developer platform), Hound (voice-enabled digital assistant), and SoundHound (music recognition mobile app). The company’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.[1]

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.[2] In 2012, SoundHound announced it had over 100 million users globally.[3] In 2014, SoundHound became the first music-search product available as a wearable.[4] Later, SoundHound became the first music recognition service shipping in autos, in a partnership with Hyundai, in the new 2015 Genesis.[5] By May 2016, SoundHound had over 300 million users globally.[6]

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.[7] 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.[8]

In January 2017, the company raised another $75 million in an investment round that included Nvidia, Samsung, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and others. [9]

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. [10] With this funding, the valuation of the company reached $1 billion. [11]

See also

References

  1. ↑ May, Patrick (3 June 2013). "Siri's got nothing on SoundHound's new app". The Mercury News. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
  2. ↑ Rollison, Damian (27 January 2010). "Tune identifier SoundHound announces new version with Pandora, tour dates". Venturebeat. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
  3. ↑ "SCREENVISION ACTIVATES SOUNDHOUND PARTNERSHIP TO CONNECT MOBILE MOVIEGOERS TO BIG SCREEN ADS | Screenvision".
  4. ↑ "SoundHound First Music Discovery Service to Be Live on Wearables | Business Wire". www.businesswire.com. Retrieved 2015-06-05.
  5. ↑ "Hyundai and Kia tap SoundHound to help you identify music in your car". Engadget. Retrieved 2015-06-05.
  6. ↑ "SoundHound now lets you use your voice to find music on the road | VentureBeat".
  7. ↑ Winkler, Rolf (2015-06-02). "SoundHound App Emerges to Take On Apple and Google in Voice Search". Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 2015-06-12. Retrieved 2016-03-01.
  8. ↑ Wauters, Robin (25 August 2011). "Music Search Startup SoundHound Partners With Spotify For Instant Streaming". TechCrunch. Retrieved 1 March 2016.
  9. ↑ Yeung, Ken (2017-01-31). "SoundHound raises $75 million to expand access to its Houndify voice-powered platform". VentureBeat.com. VentureBeat. Retrieved 2017-01-31.
  10. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (2018-05-03). "SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-09-21.
  11. ↑ Schleifer, Theodore (2018-01-24). "SoundHound, once just a music-recognition app, is now a billion dollar company". recode. Retrieved 2018-09-21.
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