SoundHound, innovator in voice enabled AI and conversational intelligence, has raised another $100 million in its new round of funding from NVIDIA GPU Ventures, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Nomura Holdings, Inc., Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Insurance Inc., and RSI Fund I. The round further saw participation from new investors Kleiner Perkins, SharesPost 100 Fund, and MKaNN which will join its early investors Global Catalyst Partners, Walden Venture Capital, and TransLink Capital.
As it looks to leverage over a decade of experience and data to make a voice recognition tool that companies can put into any platform, it will be using the funds to make its Houndify platform compete with the likes of Alexa and Google assistant.
Houndify is one of the first independent AI platforms that enables developers and entrepreneurs to deploy it anywhere and retain control of their brand and users. The company provides all the technology ingredients necessary for voice and AI integration, including the one of the world’s fastest speech recognition, natural language understanding, easy to use developer tools, knowledge graphs, and a large and rapidly growing number of domains.
Houndify’s Collective AI architecture provides access to knowledge and data from Yelp, Uber and Expedia, as well as over 100 other domains such as weather, stocks, sports, local businesses, flights, hotels, mortgage, and interactive games. Houndify also provides a large number of domains specifically targeted for the automotive industry.
“We are at the inflection point of our long-term vision that every product or service needs to have a smart voice-enabled interface, and consumers have increasingly high expectations for this requirement, beyond simple commands or skills,” said Keyvan Mohajer, co-founder and CEO of SoundHound Inc.
“With this strategic investment, we will bring the power of the proprietary technology behind our independent Houndify platform to even more users globally and amplify the rollout of our Collective AI architecture,” he added.
Several of SoundHound strategic investors will be shipping products or services that take advantage of the company’s Houndify AI platform and its patented Speech-to-Meaning and Deep Meaning Understanding technologies.
Within the first year of its launch, the company claims to have over 20,000 developers registered to use the Houndify platform for their products, including strategic partners Samsung ARTIK Smart IoT platform, and NVIDIA, which brings Houndify’s large vocabulary speech recognition and natural language understanding to cars even without cloud connection by utilizing NVIDIA GPUs. SoundHound also uses NVIDIA GPUs for fast training of the models powering its Houndify platform.
This funding round comes at a time when the projected $14.4 trillion Internet of Things market has an increasing need for practical and innovative AI technologies, including natural language processing and voice interfaces.
