SoundHound has raised a big $100M round to take on Alexa and Google Assistant

Funding Rounds

Summary

While Amazon works to get developers to adopt Alexa, SoundHound has been collecting data since it started as an early mobile app for the iPhone and Android devices. The result was always a better SoundHound app, but it’s increasingly started to try to open up that technology to developers and show it’s more powerful (and accurate) than the rest of the voice assistants on the market — and get them to use it in their services. Instead, it may come down to something as simple as a wake word that could change the entire user experience, and that’s why SoundHound is pitching Houndify as a flexible and customizable option that isn’t demanding a brand on top of it. Amazon is, after all, one of the most valuable companies in the world and Alexa has proven to be a very popular platform, even if it’s mostly for nominal requests and listening to music (and party tricks) at this point. SoundHound is going to have to convince companies — small and large — to bake in its tools, rather than go with massive competitors like Amazon with pockets deep enough to buy a whole grocery chain.

$ Funding

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Amount $100.0M Total raised
Date May 3, 2018 Announcement date
Investors - Lead investors
Company http://www.soundhound.com Funded company

Classifications

industries
No industries detected
applications
Customer Service & Support

AskAI Classifications

Labels
Conversational AI SaaS Developer Tools

Linked Companies

SoundHound AI
$50M to $100M