SoundHound, the voice AI platform, lays off 10% of employees citing ‘difficult market circumstances’ • TechCrunch

SoundHound — maker of the voice AI know-how utilized by Mercedes-Benz, Deutsche Telecom, Snap and Mastercard and extra — has laid off about 10% of its workforce amid ongoing financial turmoil throughout world markets.

The Santa Clara-headquartered firm — which went public by way of a SPAC in April of this 12 months — introduced the choice to its workers on Wednesday. Alongside that, it additionally imposed wage cuts for a few of these not laid off. The corporate didn’t specify the small print of the wage cuts, nor what number of have been affected.

“Yesterday, we introduced to our SoundHounders that we’re taking actions to streamline our firm, together with an approximate 10% discount in workforce. We don’t take this frivolously, however within the face of difficult market circumstances, we should channel our investments into the areas that proceed to drive development and permit us to finest serve our clients. We’re extraordinarily grateful to the departing colleagues which have contributed to our success as a number one voice AI platform,” mentioned Fiona J McEvoy, a director of company communications at SoundHound, in a press release emailed to TechCrunch.

SoundHound has a complete headcount of 450 workers — which means that the layoff has impacted round 45 individuals. The corporate will possible share extra particulars throughout its Q3 earnings name later at this time.

Based in 2005, SoundHound provides its voice AI platform in 25 languages. It powers voice-enabled experiences in numerous the automobiles supplied by Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and Honda. Earlier this month, the corporate additionally tied up with Samsung’s Harman Worldwide to supply totally OEM-owned and branded in-vehicle voice expertise to a number of autos.

Alongside providing its standalone platform to corporations, SoundHound has two cell apps, specifically SoundHound Music that works just like Apple’s Shazam and lets customers uncover music enjoying round them and Hound that provides voice-based search and help.

In November final 12 months, SoundHound introduced it could go public by way of a SPAC transaction with clean test firm Archimedes Tech SPAC Companions at an almost $2.1 billion valuation. It was over 5x what Apple paid for its competitor Shazam, a $400 million introduced in December 2017 and closed in September 2018.

However its fortunes as a public firm have been combined. In its final quarterly outcomes for the second quarter that ended on June 30, SoundHound reported a 26% year-on-year income drop to $6.2 million, whereas Q2 web loss spiked to just about $31 million, in comparison with $15 million in the identical quarter a 12 months earlier than.

And its market cap, like that of many tech corporations in the intervening time, is just not doing very nicely. It’s presently buying and selling at round $2/share with a market cap of $406 million.

SoundHound has develop into one other tech firm to take the layoff route throughout this financial slowdown. Along with latest layoffs introduced by Fb proprietor Meta and Twitter, others together with Netflix, Salesforce, Spotify and Tencent and lots of others have reduce collectively tens of hundreds of jobs within the final a number of months. Indian startups similar to Byju’s, Ola and Unacademy have additionally laid off tons of of workers to cut back their working bills amid dip in funding and investments.