SOUN SoundHound AI, Inc.

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SoundHound AI, Inc. Q2 F2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

AI Conference Call Analysis

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Keyvan
Co-Founder and CEO
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James
Co-Founder and CFO
Thank you, Keyvan, and good afternoon, everyone. In Q2, we had $61.9 million in revenue, up 45% year-over-year. With sustained high demand for our AI solutions, it's become more evident each quarter that SoundHound is leading the charge as a pure-play conversational AI vendor. The launch of Oasis, our self-building and self-optimizing agentic AI platform, has fueled excitement and accelerated deals. This high-performance platform, which draws upon the collective technical strengths of SoundHound in our acquired businesses, appeals to businesses looking to automate and scale reliable, consistent customer service resolutions while reducing costs. We are seeing traction across all industry verticals and in all pillars of our businesses building on this oasis momentum. As Keyvan mentioned, one of the verticals we are seeing SoundHound pull ahead of the competition is healthcare. Where we provide automated patient services powered by AI agents that facilitate appointment making, care updates, prescription refills, and more. We had seven deals in healthcare alone, with one hitting seven figures. And we continued to execute with manufacturers, bringing AI agents to vehicles and physical devices, particularly in Asia, where we had our largest deal of the quarter. The pieces are coming together, and we continue to execute on the strong pipeline we built earlier this year, resulting in an exceptional first half of the year. With that, let me discuss the second quarter financial results in more detail. As I mentioned earlier, Q2 revenue was $61.9 million, up 45% year-over-year. The growth was driven across multiple verticals, such as healthcare, financial services, technology, and automotive. and our broad-based expansion once again enabled us to realize strong customer diversification. Our enterprise AI business performed particularly well and continued to be the largest contributor to revenue. In automotive, we continued to accelerate our Asia business, growing substantially there five quarters in a row. In Q2, our GAAP gross margin was 45%, up six percentage points year over year. Our non-GAAP gross margin was 58%, which adjusts for non-cash amortization of purchased intangibles and employee stock compensation. It was flat year over year, but up 8 percentage points sequentially. We continued to drive efficiencies by modernizing infrastructure, optimizing cloud spend, consolidating legacy systems, and improving the efficiency of our core platforms, including shifting from third-party solutions to our own in-house ones, as well as realizing synergies from acquisitions. We are being prudent on costs. While acquisitions have temporarily impacted our gross margin, we continue to explore and harvest synergies and expect to see our gross margin exceeding 70% in the future, similar to when we went public. R&D expenses were $27.1 million in Q2, up 5% year-over-year, largely due to acquisitions and related headcount and development costs. Sales and marketing expenses were $16.6 million in Q2, reflecting a 5% year-over-year increase, primarily driven by acquisitions. Outside of that, the bulk of our investments here continue to be go-to-market efforts via direct and indirect sales, as well as customer success to increase retention. We continue to elevate our brand, and market presence continues to generate demand and convert more opportunities into pipelines. G&A expenses were $26 million in Q2, reflecting a 43% year-over-year increase, primarily driven by various legal, advisory, and other costs related to our acquisitions, including increased headcount. We also continued to add additional resources to support necessary functions as we continue to grow. We had non-cash employee stock compensation of $21 million and depreciation and amortization, including the amortization of intangibles, of $11 million in Q2, All of which are included in our GAAP results. Our GAAP operating loss for the quarter of $43.3 million improved by 45% compared to the same quarter in the previous year. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $9.6 million, an improvement of 33% year-over-year. GAAP net loss was $42.8 million and GAAP net loss per share of $0.10. Non-GAAP net loss was $9 million and non-GAAP net loss per share was 2 cents in this quarter. This adjusts for items such as non-cash depreciation and amortization, M&A transaction costs, and stock-based compensation. Our balance sheet remains strong with cash and equivalents at quarter end of $203 million with no debt. Now let me discuss our financial outlook. Q2 was clearly a strong quarter for us as the demand for our solutions accelerated. We are moving fast to capture the underlying market shifts, which continue to be in our favor. With a strong first half of the year, we are increasing our revenue expectations to be in the range of $230 million to $260 million. Overall, this outlook affirms our expectation of another year of very strong growth. We are pleased with the cost synergies we have realized from acquisitions and the targeted investments we have made in go-to-market, such as in the channel and in technology with Oasis. We will continue to stay aggressive and capture market share by expanding within our existing customer base and attracting new customers with our rapid innovation. In closing, it's clear that our momentum is real. We are excited by the strong interest we are seeing with Oasis, which is a testament to the category-defining technology we continue to deliver to the market. We will continue to be disciplined on costs as we drive our business towards achieving profitable growth. We have a lot of opportunity in front of us, and we are operating in a way that reflects that optimism. With that, we will now move to Q&A.