In 2025, SoundHound AI (NASDAQ:SOUN) took further steps in reshaping how consumers and enterprises interact with machines.

Rounding the year, Benzinga caught up with the CEO, Keyvan Mohajer, to reflect on key accomplishments and discuss what 2026 has in store for the leading voice AI company.

The Amelia Acquisition Materializes

SoundHound began the year on a firm footing, driven by the early success of Polaris, its proprietary foundation model for speech and language.

Polaris had already posted headline-grabbing benchmarks: up to four times lower latency and 35% lower word error rates than comparable big tech models, while supporting nearly 30 mature languages. But according to Mohajer, the real story emerged when customers put the system through its paces in production.

“While we showed a 35% better error rate than big tech models using industry standard benchmarks, when our customers tested Polaris with their own data, the improvement was as high as 70%,” Mohajer says. That leap in accuracy has become a major driver of SoundHound’s differentiation. 

As more Amelia platform customers migrate from third-party legacy vendors to Polaris, he notes, “we’ve cut error rates, lowered costs, and enabled faster iteration cycles.”

By midyear, those product advantages were reflected in the numbers. Second-quarter revenue surged to $42.7 million, a 217% year-over-year increase, as the platform crossed 1 billion processed queries per month.

A key catalyst was last year’s acquisition of Amelia, an agentic AI platform with a deep presence in financial services, insurance, and healthcare. The deal brought hundreds of enterprise customers and a foothold in some of the most demanding regulated sectors.

“While we have diversified the industries we support, the core ingredient to succeed is the same: having the best conversational AI for customer service and user interface experiences,” Mohajer says. 

Still, vision alignments surprised even him.

“What stood out most was how closely these enterprise customers aligned with our core ideal that dependable, real-world performance matters more than flashy demonstrations,” he clarified.

With no overlap in verticals and highly complementary technology stacks, the integration has accelerated product development and strengthened SoundHound’s compliance posture.

The result, Mohajer argues, is a suite of AI agents that “not only perform reliably but also make decisions, drive outcomes, and adapt to enterprise workflows,” making the platform more “robust, enterprise-ready, and capable of powering the next generation of autonomous AI-driven applications.”

Solving India’s Linguistic Puzzle

By the third quarter, SoundHound’s ecosystem evolution became clear. Revenue reached $42.0 million, up 68% from a year earlier, bringing year-to-date sales to $114 million, a 127% jump. The company’s cash balance rose to $269 million, and it continued to expand into new geographies and form factors.

One of the most significant moves of the year was a major deal to bring SoundHound’s Chat AI into millions of smart devices in India, including partnerships with prominent two-wheeler brands. India is a leading growth market, but its cultural complexity makes it a challenging puzzle to solve for language technology.

“One of the biggest challenges in India is the diversity of languages, dialects, and accents. Users are often even switching between these within a single sentence,” Mohajer says.

“This level of linguistic complexity is difficult for traditional voice systems, but it’s a core strength of SoundHound’s technology.”

Designed to handle code-switching, regional accents, and colloquial speech in noisy real-world environments, SoundHound’s stack enables OEMs to deliver a consistent, intuitive experience without forcing users to change how they speak. “That ability to understand people as they are is what will drive adoption and trust in the Indian market,” he notes.

Toward New Growth

SoundHound also pushed deeper into in-vehicle monetization, extending voice commerce beyond food and coffee ordering to include restaurant reservations and parking payments.

Partnerships with OpenTable and Parkopedia, along with wins across European and U.S. automakers, laid the groundwork for what Mohajer calls a defining milestone in 2026.

“One of the milestones I’m most excited about is seeing agentic voice commerce become a real, everyday behavior inside the vehicle and ultimately any IoT device with a microphone,” he clarifies.

SoundHound is already running pilots with leading automotive brands for hands-free ordering and paid parking, and it plans to showcase an expanded vision at CES 2026. With this technology, possibilities scale far beyond commerce, from intelligent vehicle diagnostics and service appointment bookings to calendars, messages, and travel planning.

“What makes our agentic voice commerce platform especially powerful is that it is limitless,” Mohajer argues. Enterprise customers can bring their own AI agents into the vehicle, and SoundHound can also host any agent compatible with MCP and A2A protocols, “creating an ecosystem where innovation can scale quickly.”

“Seeing these pilots mature into production deployments and new logo wins will be a defining moment for us in 2026,” he concludes.

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