SoundHound AI Inc Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: Gil Luria - DA Davidson - Analyst : Keyvan, there's been some pretty big breakthroughs recently in the efficiency of AI models. And those models are open-source and getting a lot smaller. I know you develop your own models, you use other models as well. Does the advances in this technology make it possible for you, especially in the restaurant drive-thru business, to put more of the intelligence on the device and therefore maybe reduce latency, make it more efficient, and improve the performance? Is this something where you can leverage the recent advances?

Question: Gil Luria - DA Davidson - Analyst : Yeah. Lucky was very impressed when he was there. I'm sorry I wasn't able to make it. Nitesh, for you, that backlog number has grown quite a bit. Can you give us a couple more parameters around it? What's the duration of that backlog number? Maybe by vertical or by pillar, what are the different pieces in that? I think you said $1.2 billion.

Question: Thomas Blakey - Cantor Fitzgerald - Analyst : It's great to hear about all those POCs off of CES and probably even work you've done prior to that. Could we maybe click there and just talk about what the typical time to revenue is for POC? Then I have a follow-up.

Question: Thomas Blakey - Cantor Fitzgerald - Analyst : Yeah. No, that was a great review, and I appreciate that more than you know. And yeah, I was asking Keyvan a lot about the POCs from the pillar three, and it's great to see the flywheel in motion already impacting pillar one. It'd be exciting to see what that unit ramp looks like in pillar one in the coming year. Maybe in the follow-up, the seven-figure deal in the energy vertical sounds like really exciting in terms of expanding into new verticals like this. First of all, from an administrative perspective, Nitesh, maybe any kind of like what's the economic impact in the current quarter or early '25, that'd be helpful. And what does this kind of portend came on for, Keyvan, for what SoundHound's bringing to outside the core, auto restaurant and finserv and healthcare verticals, that'd be helpful. Thank you very much. REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. FEBRUARY 27, 2025 / 10:00PM, SOUN.OQ - Q4 2024 SoundHound AI Inc Earnings Call

Question: Michael Latimore - Northland Securities - Analyst : On Amelia, they have both kind of customer engagement and then more internal IT support use cases. Are either one of those sort of more pronounced in the pipeline?

Question: Michael Latimore - Northland Securities - Analyst : Got it. And then just on the pricing or contracting model, is it most kind of your -- under that SaaS model where you get a annual subscription or is there an element that's kind of used to do best?

Question: Scott Buck - H.C. Wainwright & Co., LLC - Analyst : Thanks for taking my questions. I guess the first one, when I think about these secondary verticals, whether it's financial services, retail, telecom, healthcare, how are you prioritizing those? And do you have the capacity to go after all at once?

Question: Scott Buck - H.C. Wainwright & Co., LLC - Analyst : Great, I appreciate all that. And then I want to follow up on the earlier question about cross-selling and up-selling. It sounds like you're already starting to see some momentum there. I'm curious, where is the sweet spot? Is that 9 months out? 18 months out? What does that look like, I guess the ramp or the cadence of how that's executed?

Question: Glenn Mattson - Ladenburg Thalmann - Analyst : Keyvan, I'm curious, you mentioned military a couple of times. Maybe wondering if you could expand if you're able to on what you're doing there. And just between the military and the large energy deal, just curious how that kind of these new verticals fall into the sales funnel? Or do you have guys out there looking at new verticals that are -- haven't historically been in the sweet spot?

Question: Glenn Mattson - Ladenburg Thalmann - Analyst : Right. Thanks, Keyvan. And Nitesh, curious on just with the guidance and the -- just curious, I know it's a lot more SaaS than it used to be. There used to be some lumpiness a couple of years back when you get a large kind of on-prem auto deal. Has that gone away? Is that still something we should think about? And just kind of overall, now that the business has shifted quite dramatically with the addition of 1 million and these other things, just your ability to -- how confident you feel about the general ability to forecast and all that?

Question: Leo Carpio - Joseph Gunnar - Analyst : I've got two questions. The first question is regarding your platform. When you look at the platform, are there any missing technologies or systems that you think you still need that you need to go and acquire? And then secondly, on the auto POC contracts, how quickly can those POCs move

Question: Leo Carpio - Joseph Gunnar - Analyst : The second question was --