Opportunities in Voice AI: SoundHound CFO Nitesh Sharan

Founded in 2005, SoundHound AI [SOUN] develops voice artificial intelligence (AI) solutions for automotive and IoT applications, enabling natural conversations between humans and technology in a range of segments, including healthcare and energy. The company’s vision is to “voice-enable the world with conversational intelligence”. 

SoundHound’s CFO Nitesh Sharan leads the company’s financial planning and accounting efforts. He has previously worked in financial management roles at companies such as Nike [NIKE], Hewlett-Packard and Accenture [ACN]. He joined the most recent episode of OPTO Sessions to discuss the new verticals the company is expanding into, and how customer demand and partnerships are helping SoundHound “aggressively grow”. 

Core Pillars

Sharan outlines three distinct verticals into which the company is tapping. The first, voice-enabled products, represents the integration of voice AI in automobiles, televisions and IoT devices. It was SoundHound’s primary growth driver for several years, he explains. “Up until 2023, it was roughly 70–80% of our business.”

More recently, however, a second vertical — voice-enabled services — has taken the lead in terms of growth. With this application of agentic AI, voice AI models fill customer service roles in a number of sectors. 

Sharan provides an example: when you call a customer service hotline, rather than the traditional interactive voice response, you get a voice AI agent. “Now the technology can hold any conversation. It picks up immediately, it’s on 24/7. It can serve all the complex challenges that you might have, whether you need to return a pair of shoes, update your insurance plan or transfer money in a banking portal.”

Additionally, SoundHound is targeting a third vertical known as voice commerce that combines these capabilities. This vertical involves using voice AI to seamlessly connect customers to products and services. “Imagine you’re stuck in traffic and you need to book an upcoming vacation, or you need to reorder your contact lenses,” Sharan explains. “There’s so many transactions that ultimately can happen through voice.”

With this diversification of verticals, SoundHound has also undergone a considerable diversification of its revenue streams. “A couple of years ago, three customers alone comprised over 70% of our revenue. We now have no customer greater than 10%.”

“Basically everybody across the board is saying, how can I utilize AI to improve my business, whether that’s for cost efficiencies or revenue generation.” This has enabled the company to tap into opportunities in areas as diverse as restaurants and hospitality, healthcare, financial services, insurance and even energy.

Customer-Powered Growth

SoundHound has gained a key competitive advantage over the years, mainly through the acquisition of patents. “We built up hundreds of patents across all elements of deep neural networks to voice recognition, natural language understanding and text-to-speech elements. We’ve also built a deep patent stack on monetization.”

With such technical coverage, the company deploys what Sharan calls “agnostic architecture” that can work for a wide range of partners. 

Indeed, partnerships have been a key part of SoundHound’s growth trajectory. 

“We were the first company to partner with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into the automotive space with Stellantis [STLA] in Europe and their premium DS brand,” Sharan notes. In Q1 2025, the company partnered separately with Nvidia [NVDA] and Tencent [TCEHY] to integrate large language model capabilities directly into vehicles. Additionally, in its Q1 2025 earnings release, the company announced a new AI Agent “to transform the customer experience of a large utilities company” in Q4 2024.

Restaurants are another key area of growth, with SoundHound expanding its voice AI services to over 13,000 restaurant locations. “We’ve really seen a lot of disruption in the restaurant space, which has so many challenges with labor shortages and commodity cost pressure that AI makes a lot of sense for them for consistency of performance.”

These advantages have translated into consistent triple-digit growth, with SoundHound recording $29.1m in revenue in Q1, up 151% year-over-year. For the full year, the company expects revenue in the range of $157m–177m.

This growth has been accelerated by key acquisitions, notably the Amelia AI agent that it bought for $80m in August 2024. “Historically, up until the beginning of last year, we were growing 40–60% consistently, fully organically” says Sharan. “Last year we went out and we acquired companies and that has inflected our growth to over 100%.”

That’s not to say that there are no challenges, however. Sharan stresses that, “as a smaller early-stage public company, managing resources is really important for us … having limited resources forces hard choices and prioritization.”

Still, for a small company, SoundHound is envisioning global reach. “We work in dozens of languages and over 100 acoustic variations. We’re a global company that has business on several continents around the world.”

Notwithstanding this focus on aggressive growth, it is ultimately the needs of the customer that define SoundHound’s trajectory, Sharan explains: “it’s the customer pacing that dictates how fast [we grow] and how we allocate resources.”