SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN), a leader in voice artificial intelligence solutions, showcased significant year-over-year growth driven by its advanced Polaris foundation model, strategic acquisitions and a record-breaking pipeline despite missing the revenue estimates.

What Happened: According to data from Benzinga Pro, SoundHound’s first-quarter revenue grew by 151% to $29.1 million, but missed the consensus estimate of $30.38 million.

CEO Keyvan Mohajer emphasized the strong underlying performance and the success of the company’s investments.

A key driver of this growth is the company’s proprietary multimodal, multilingual foundation model, Polaris, which reported lower latency, higher accuracy in noisy environments, better word error rate, and extensive language support.

“We’ve been investing in Polaris, our multimodal, multilingual foundation model, and it has proven to be a real differentiator against our closest peers,” he explained.

The company also credited its strategic acquisitions of SYNQ3, Amelia, and Allset for contributing to its strong performance and expanding market reach.

SoundHound’s voice commerce initiative attracted interest from major automotive OEMs and restaurant chains. Mohajer noted the unprecedented speed at which OEMs are pursuing proof-of-concepts for this solution.

CFO Nitesh Sharan reaffirmed the company’s 2025 revenue guidance of $157 to $177 million, despite a $2 million adverse impact from a customer’s change of control. He also highlighted the increasing diversification of revenue streams across verticals, including automotive, restaurants, financial services, and healthcare.

Looking ahead, SoundHound emphasized its record pipeline, fueled by increasing demand for its advanced voice AI solutions and the growing recognition of its technological differentiation. “We have a strong pipeline of new OEMs, and they, along with the restaurants, are very excited about our voice commerce solutions,” he said.

See Also: Tinder Parent Match Group Cuts 13% Of Workforce After Earnings Miss, Taps Gen Z Features Like ‘Double Date’ To Spark Growth

Why It Matters: "SoundHound continues to extend its reach and create new possibilities for real-world AI applications. The release of our complete AI agent platform delivers full, voice-enabled Agentic AI for customers across all industries," said Mohajer, co-founder and CEO of SoundHound AI.

SOUN shares were lower by 51.69% on a year-to-date basis and 105.05% over a year. On Thursday, the shares closed 6.22% higher and it was 1.54% lower in premarket on Friday.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE:SPY) and Invesco QQQ Trust ETF (NASDAQ:QQQ), which track the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq 100 index, respectively, mixed in premarket on Friday. The SPY was up 0.28% at $566.69, while the QQQ declined 0.075% to $488.29, according to Benzinga Pro data.

Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings shows that SOUN had a weaker price trend over the medium term but a stronger trend over the short and long term. Its momentum ranking was solid at 96.64th percentile, whereas its value ranking was poor at 7.98th percentile; the details of other metrics are available here.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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