SoundHound Inc., Global Leader in Voice AI Technology, to Become Publicly Traded Through Proposed Merger With Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners Co.

• SoundHound’s independent voice AI platform, built on proprietary natural language technology, enables businesses to deliver best-in-class conversational experiences to their customers across 22 languages.

• Voice AI is projected to be a $160 billion market opportunity and SoundHound is at the forefront of helping brands build differentiated, voice-enabled experiences that grow customer loyalty and deliver value.

• SoundHound has gained wide market adoption and powers the voice experience in leading global brands including Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Pandora, Mastercard, Deutsche Telekom, Snap, VIZIO, KIA, and Stellantis, among others.

• Transaction values SoundHound at a pro-forma enterprise value of approximately $2.1 billion and provides up to $244 million in gross proceeds, including $133 million from Archimedes’ cash-in-trust and $111 million from a fully-committed common equity PIPE that is priced at $10.00 per share.

• The PIPE is anchored by Oracle, Koch Industries, and MKaNN Ventures as well as investments by Cota Capital, VIZIO, HTC, FIH Mobile (a Foxconn Technology Group company), Structural Capital, Provco Group, Sompo, Pejman Nozad, and others. The PIPE includes equal contribution from strategic and financial investors, demonstrating strong validation of SoundHound’s technology and business.

• The transaction is expected to close in Q1 of 2022. The combined company will be named SoundHound AI, Inc. and plans to be listed on Nasdaq under the new ticker symbol SOUN.

• Management of SoundHound and Archimedes will release a joint investor webcast to discuss the proposed transaction on November 16, 2021 at 10:00 am ET.

SoundHound Inc. , a global leader in voice artificial intelligence , and Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners Co. , a blank check company, announced they have entered into a definitive merger agreement. The combined company will be called SoundHound AI, Inc. and is expected to be publicly listed on Nasdaq under the symbol SOUN following the closing of the transaction.

SoundHound has developed an independent voice AI platform that allows businesses across industries to integrate intelligent conversational voice assistants into their products. SoundHound’s breakthrough innovations include Speech-to-Meaning® and Deep Meaning Understanding® technologies that process speech in one step with speed and accuracy, allowing people to interact with products and services the same way they do with each other—by simply talking.

Adoption of voice AI is rapidly expanding, with the market opportunity expected to reach $160 billion by 2026. Businesses across industries are realizing that voice is the next frontier for their brands in the digital revolution and are adopting voice AI to deliver differentiated customer experiences. Today, SoundHound’s technology powers the voice experience in millions of products from leading global brands, including Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, Pandora, Mastercard, Deutsche Telekom, Snap, VIZIO, KIA, Stellantis, and more. SoundHound processes over 100 million queries per month across the company’s ecosystem of product partnerships. Query volume doubled in the first half of 2021 and is projected to exceed 1 billion by the end of the year.

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“We believe voice AI is poised to create the next major disruption in computing. Companies across industries recognize that voice AI is essential to customer retention, brand loyalty, market competitiveness, and future success. The growing demand for those companies to own their customer relationships and data have positioned SoundHound as a leading solution for voice assistants globally,” stated Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and Co-Founder, SoundHound Inc. “This transaction will accelerate our mission to voice-enable the world with conversational intelligence.”

SoundHound’s leading-edge technology has been developed over the last 16 years and includes 227 patents granted or pending with solutions available across cloud-only, embedded-only, and hybrid connectivity. The technology is available in 22 languages, with additional languages planned in the near future. The company’s developer platform, Houndify®, gives clients access to dashboards and development tools to analyze customer usage and behavior and better optimize the voice experience of their products.

SoundHound’s custom voice assistants allow businesses to build customer loyalty and deliver real business value with enhanced customer experiences and new monetization opportunities. For example, using SoundHound, businesses can voice-enable their products so consumers can say things like, “Turn off the air conditioning and lower the windows,” while in their cars, “Find romantic comedies released in the last year,” while streaming on their TV, and even place food orders from their devices or at a drive-through. Additionally, SoundHound’s technology can address complex user queries such as, “Show me all restaurants within half a mile of the Space Needle that are open past 9pm on Wednesdays and have outdoor seating,” and follow-on qualifications such as “Okay, don’t show me anything with less than 3 stars or fast food.”

The SoundHound developer platform, Houndify®, is an open-access platform that allows developers to leverage SoundHound’s voice AI technology and a library of over 100 content domains, including commonly used domains for points of interest, weather, flight status, sports, and more. Houndify’s Collective AI® is an architecture for connecting domain knowledge that encourages collaboration and contribution among developers, is always learning, and is greater than the sum of its parts—ensuring the platform continues to become smarter as it grows.

Eric Ball, Chairman of Archimedes, stated, “Much like Apple disrupted and revolutionized human-machine interaction via the perfection of touch, SoundHound is poised to disrupt and revolutionize human-machine interaction via voice. SoundHound, with its breakthrough natural language technology and Collective AI approach, as well as its status as an independent voice AI provider, enables device makers around the world to incorporate conversational AI into their products and join a growing voice AI ecosystem, all while retaining full control of their brand. SoundHound is being embraced by an ever-increasing list of industry-leading clients, partners and investors and Archimedes is proud and thrilled to be the one to bring SoundHound to the public market.”

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​​Following completion of the transaction, SoundHound will retain its experienced management team, which includes Keyvan Mohajer (Founder & CEO), Majid Emami (Co-Founder & VP of Engineering), James Hom (Co-Founder & VP of Products), Michael Zagorsek (COO), Nitesh Sharan (CFO), Tim Stonehocker (CTO), Kamyar Mohajer (VP Corporate Strategy & Expansion), Amir Arbabi (VP Business Development), Angeline Tucker (VP People & Culture), Warren Heit (VP Legal & General Counsel), and Lisa Flattery (VP Marketing).

In 2005, SoundHound’s founders, a group of Stanford graduates, embarked on a journey to build the capability for people to have conversational interactions with machines. They first developed an approach to sound recognition that led to a music recognition mobile app which has received over 315 million downloads worldwide. Over the next 10 years, the SoundHound team worked on a fundamentally new technology to revolutionize human-to-device voice interaction. In 2015, SoundHound unveiled its voice AI platform to the world. By combining the two-step process of converting speech-to-text and then text-to-speech into a single step with its Speech-to-Meaning® technology, SoundHound opened up the possibility for businesses to build custom voice assistants that deliver faster, more accurate voice experiences to their customers.

Today, voice assistants are becoming ubiquitous. Universal adoption of voice interfaces has created an imperative for companies of all sizes across industries: Extend your brand through a custom voice assistant to retain your customer relationships and create a new channel for innovation, monetization, and revenue generation. In response, leading companies, including automotive OEMs, consumer electronics, streaming services, telecom companies, and financial services organizations have turned to SoundHound to help them create an industry-leading interactive voice experience.

Prior to today’s announcement, SoundHound has already created an unprecedented industry alliance with over $280 million of prior investments from Hyundai, Daimler AG / Mercedes-Benz, Samsung, Tencent, NVIDIA, Orange, Korea Telecom, Nomura, Midea, Naver, Line, Cota Capital, Sompo Japan, Walden VC, Kleiner Perkins, Translink Capital, The Private Shares Fund, Global Catalyst Partners, and more.

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