Latest news with #voiceAI
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Powerhouse Could Be Just Getting Started
SoundHound AI specializes in voice AI technology. Its neutral approach to customers and streamlined focus are advantages over larger competitors. There are risks, but the potential upside makes SoundHound AI an intriguing long-term stock idea today. 10 stocks we like better than SoundHound AI › Sound and voice add an additional layer to artificial intelligence (AI) that often seems to fly under the radar. However, make no mistake about it, voice AI technology presents a massive opportunity and is crucial to delivering AI to real-world, consumer-facing applications. SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN) is among the leaders in this field, and its stock price has risen over 205% over the past three years, even as it still trades nearly 60% below its all-time high today. While the stock carries some risks, it's an AI powerhouse that could be just getting started. Here's why the stock could be a huge long-term winner, and why investors should consider buying and holding the shares today. There's a bit more nuance to voice AI technology than a text prompt. It has an additional layer, where a model must hear sound, then translate it into machine language with the proper meaning and context, before analyzing it. SoundHound AI was around long before the AI boom kicked off a few years ago. The company began in the automotive industry, where vehicle brands have used its voice AI for applications such as hands-free voice commands. Now, with the use cases rapidly expanding to include customer service agents, voice-based ordering, and others, the total addressable market is estimated to be $140 billion. However, the space is highly competitive. There are several other voice AI companies, including multiple "Magnificent Seven" companies, who have voice AI baked into their broader offerings. SoundHound AI may not be the largest player in the field, but it benefits from two distinct advantages. First, the company specializes in voice AI. Often, a company that eats, sleeps, and breathes a single thing is better than a massive company that does hundreds of different things. Focus can be a powerful tool. Apple's years-long struggles with its voice assistant, Siri, illustrate that size doesn't always translate to success. Second, SoundHound AI takes a neutral approach with its customers. It will white-label its technology, rather than force its logo on consumer-facing aspects of its customers' products and services. Its stance can make SoundHound AI a preferable partner for many brands, much like how The Trade Desk's independent platform appeals to brands in the digital advertising space. One of the hurdles for a promising company like SoundHound AI is expanding beyond that initial, successful market niche. Fortunately, the company is expanding beyond the automotive industry and gaining traction in new market segments. It acquired voice AI company Amelia last summer to expand its footprint and now works with some of the leading restaurants, hotels, gyms, and other consumer-facing businesses. Acquisitions always help juice growth, hence the big jump from $85 million in 2024 revenue to an estimated $159 million this year. Still, estimates for next year indicate roughly 27% revenue growth: SoundHound AI is clearly growing, and the broader demand for AI could continue to provide the necessary tailwinds to sustain that growth, as long as the company continues to win business. SoundHound AI's valuation is steep enough to make one pause. The stock trades at almost 25 times 2025 revenue estimates. That valuation isn't so high that it dooms the stock to underperform for years on end, but it does leave the company with a tighter margin for error. Growth must continue, and management must operate the business cleanly. But if the company delivers on its revenue estimates and sustains similar growth beyond next year, the stock can grow into and beyond its current price tag. SoundHound AI must continue to differentiate itself from larger competitors. That's not a given, which makes the stock a bit risky. Still, that's par for the course with most up-and-coming companies. If things go well, SoundHound AI's impressive voice AI technology and promising growth potential could yield lucrative rewards for investors over the coming years and beyond. Before you buy stock in SoundHound AI, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and SoundHound AI wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $687,731!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $945,846!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 818% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 175% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 23, 2025 Justin Pope has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Apple and The Trade Desk. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Powerhouse Could Be Just Getting Started was originally published by The Motley Fool
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Synthflow AI Raises $20M to Transform the $168B Global Conversational AI Market With Enterprise AI Voice Agents
The company's platform enables non-technical business users to rapidly deploy advanced voice AI that previously required specialized teams, big budgets, and long onboarding times Funding will fuel Synthflow AI's global growth and accelerate further expansion into mid-market and enterprise clients, including contact centers BERLIN, June 25, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Synthflow AI, the voice AI platform for automated phone calls, today announced a $20M Series A investment round to drive the next wave of enterprise adoption for AI voice agents. The round is led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Atlantic Labs and Singular. This follows the company's seed round last year, bringing the total funding to $30M. The new capital will support global expansion, including the opening of a new office in the US, and accelerate development of its best-in-class voice AI agent platform. After decades of slow progress, voice AI technology is at a turning point. Recent breakthroughs have made it viable for enterprises to deploy AI voice agents at scale across a wide range of use cases. From customer service to appointment scheduling and lead qualification, these agents can transform global operations, delivering exceptional support at a fraction of the cost. For contact centers and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies that dominate the $159B US customer service market, this shift presents a major growth opportunity, driven by always-on voice agents that deliver natural conversations. Until now, deploying this technology while standing out in an increasingly crowded space has been a challenge, demanding deep AI expertise, specialized teams, inflated budgets, and drawn-out onboarding. Founded in 2023 by serial entrepreneurs Albert Astabatsyan, Hakob Astabatsyan, and Sassun Mirzakhan-Saky, Synthflow AI democratizes access to advanced voice AI with a no-code platform that lets enterprises easily create, deploy and scale natural-sounding, cost-effective voice agents tailored to their business needs. Designed for non-technical users, Synthflow AI's white-label voice agents require zero code, are highly customizable, and can handle everything from simple inquiries to complex workflows including customer support, appointment scheduling, inbound lead qualification, AI-to-human call transfers, and collecting and sharing real-time information at scale. With over 200 integrations across calendars, CRMs and telephony systems, Synthflow AI can be implemented rapidly and cost effectively, a contrast to the typical six-month onboarding required by legacy vendors. Synthflow AI's pioneering AI Voice Operating System (OS) is built to be indistinguishable from a human voice, offering the best-in-class quality, low latency, and high reliability. It can handle complex, high-value use cases with no human intervention. Since its seed round in 2024, Synthflow AI has expanded its R&D team to further boost product performance and has rapidly scaled to integrate with BPO providers and contact centers worldwide. Synthflow AI agents have already delivered measurable impact: Over 5 million hours of contact center operations saved 35% more calls answered compared to non-AI operators 45 million calls handled with a 99.9% uptime Hakob Astabatsyan, co-founder and CEO of Synthflow AI, said: "Businesses and their customers are becoming increasingly comfortable communicating with AI agents. Our mission at Synthflow AI is to make high-quality, low-cost AI voice agents more accessible to improve customer services everywhere. The BPO and contact center market represents a massive opportunity for us, and we're already experiencing significant growth in this sector thanks to the simplicity of our no-code platform and the reliability and quality of our AI voice agents. This funding will help us accelerate this growth and scale our product so that we can continue pioneering Voice AI technology globally." Luca Bocchio, Partner at Accel, said: "Voice AI is at a real inflection point, voice agents have been improving rapidly and have never been more cost effective to deploy. The Synthflow AI team is seizing the moment from legacy players by making this technology more accessible. The market opportunity for deploying voice agents in traditional customer support use cases is vast and, as infrastructure continues to evolve and AI capabilities improve further, new emerging use cases in areas such as healthcare, financial services, education and more will continue to open up. Hakob and the team's technical expertise and momentum so far have been impressive. We're delighted to be investing in their vision and joining the journey ahead." For more information about Synthflow AI, visit About Synthflow AI Synthflow AI is a no-code platform for deploying voice AI agents that automate phone calls across contact center operations and business process outsourcing (BPO) at scale. A G2 Grid Leader for AI Agents, Synthflow helps mid-market and enterprise companies manage routine calls to save teams time and resources without increasing headcount. Backed by Accel and trusted by over 1,000 customers, its growth reflects a broader industry shift toward sophisticated and accessible conversational AI in a global market projected to reach $168.2 billion. About Accel Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Bumble, Celonis, CrowdStrike, Deliveroo, Fiverr, Freshworks, Miro, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more, visit View source version on Contacts Media Contact: press@ +44(0)7867488769 Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How Synthflow AI is cutting through the noise in a loud AI voice category
The conversational AI market has exploded since ChatGPT was released in November 2022 and is predicted to grow into a nearly $50 billion global industry by 2031, according to MarketsAndMarkets. Synthflow AI is just one of many companies building in this space that hopes to stand out from the pack because of its focus on being enterprise-grade and easy to set up. Berlin-based Synthflow is a no-code platform that lets enterprises build and deploy customized white-labeled voice AI customer service agents. The company, which launched in 2023, has amassed more than 1,000 customers and has handled more than 45 million calls. The startup's voice agents are both HIPAA and GDPR compliant and can be plugged into more than 200 integrations with other enterprise platforms including Salesforce, Twilio, and HubSpot, among others. Hakob Astabatsyan, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that he and his co-founders, Albert Astabatsyan, now CPO, and Sassun Mirzakhan-Saky, now CTO, started messing around with OpenAI's ChatGPT API back in early 2023 to find potential ways to build no-code business applications on top of the AI model. They started with a text-to-text AI bot and then tried to build a voice bot. When they realized how much harder voice was, they got excited about the potential. 'We realized, oh my god, voice is really complicated, right? To actually make AI speak in real time like we do, having this 400 milliseconds latency, and handling interruptions, it turned out to be like such a complicated task,' Astabatsyan said. 'We fell in love with this problem, and we said, look, we're gonna work only on voice bots from now on.' The group formed Synthflow and spent the rest of 2023 building and launched its first version of the product at the beginning of 2024 before releasing an enterprise-grade version of the tech at the end of the year. The company grew 15x last year and has seen over 90% retention from its enterprise customers, according to Astabatsyan. 'We process 5 million calls monthly,' he said. 'Last year, it was like, I don't know, 1 million, 2 million, and and then we started growing very quickly. This is where Synthflow started really getting better and better because we had this velocity.' The startup also recently raised a $20 million Series A round led by Accel with participation from existing investors Atlantic Labs and Singular. Astabatsyan said the company raised this recent round so that it could expand its team, boost research and development, and open its first U.S. office in an undecided location. Luca Bocchio, a partner at Accel, told TechCrunch that the Accel team had been tracking Synthflow since it started developing its first product. What stood out to Bocchio was the founding team's drive and its early push into building enterprise-friendly integrations. 'This team has [had] really strong views since the getgo about creating more depth with the technology and extensive integrations across CRMs, across tools enterprises may use to really provide enterprise-grade compliance,' Bocchio said. Regardless of the company's traction, conversational AI seems poised to be a tough category. There are numerous other companies building in the space including Bret Taylor's Sierra, which has raised $285 million in VC money, and Bland AI, which has raised more than $50 million in venture funding, to name a couple. 'AI is moving so fast, and sometimes things happen faster than you would expect,' Astabatsyan said. 'But for us, it's very clear. We're at this stage where, I would say, [we're] in a post-product-market-fit era, where we know who our customers are. We have a pretty clear idea what's our product roadmap, and where we want to be in the next three to five years.'
TechCrunch
24-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
How Synthflow AI is cutting through the noise in a loud AI voice category
The conversational AI market has exploded since ChatGPT was released in November 2022 and is predicted to grow into a nearly $50 billion global industry by 2031, according to MarketsAndMarkets. Synthflow AI is just one of many companies building in this space that hopes to stand out from the pack because of its focus on being enterprise-grade and easy to set up. Berlin-based Synthflow is a no-code platform that lets enterprises build and deploy customized white-labeled voice AI customer service agents. The company, which launched in 2023, has amassed more than 1,000 customers and has handled more than 45 million calls. The startup's voice agents are both HIPAA and GDPR compliant and can be plugged into more than 200 integrations with other enterprise platforms including Salesforce, Twilio, and HubSpot, among others. Hakob Astabatsyan, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that he and his co-founders, Albert Astabatsyan, now CPO, and Sassun Mirzakhan-Saky, now CTO, started messing around with OpenAI's ChatGPT API back in early 2023 to find potential ways to build no-code business applications on top of the AI model. They started with a text-to-text AI bot and then tried to build a voice bot. When they realized how much harder voice was, they got excited about the potential. 'We realized, oh my god, voice is really complicated, right? To actually make AI speak in real time like we do, having this 400 milliseconds latency, and handling interruptions, it turned out to be like such a complicated task,' Astabatsyan said. 'We fell in love with this problem, and we said, look, we're gonna work only on voice bots from now on.' Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW The group formed Synthflow and spent the rest of 2023 building and launched its first version of the product at the beginning of 2024 before releasing an enterprise-grade version of the tech at the end of the year. The company grew 15x last year and has seen over 90% retention from its enterprise customers, according to Astabatsyan. 'We process 5 million calls monthly,' he said. 'Last year, it was like, I don't know, 1 million, 2 million, and and then we started growing very quickly. This is where Synthflow started really getting better and better because we had this velocity.' The startup also recently raised a $20 million Series A round led by Accel with participation from existing investors Atlantic Labs and Singular. Astabatsyan said the company raised this recent round so that it could expand its team, boost research and development, and open its first U.S. office in an undecided location. Luca Bocchio, a partner at Accel, told TechCrunch that the Accel team had been tracking Synthflow since it started developing its first product. What stood out to Bocchio was the founding team's drive and its early push into building enterprise-friendly integrations. 'This team has [had] really strong views since the getgo about creating more depth with the technology and extensive integrations across CRMs, across tools enterprises may use to really provide enterprise-grade compliance,' Bocchio said. Regardless of the company's traction, conversational AI seems poised to be a tough category. There are numerous other companies building in the space including Bret Taylor's Sierra, which has raised $285 million in VC money, and Bland AI, which has raised more than $50 million in venture funding, to name a couple. 'AI is moving so fast, and sometimes things happen faster than you would expect,' Astabatsyan said. 'But for us, it's very clear. We're at this stage where, I would say, [we're] in a post-product-market-fit era, where we know who our customers are. We have a pretty clear idea what's our product roadmap, and where we want to be in the next three to five years.'
TechCrunch
24-06-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Wispr Flow raises $30M from Menlo Ventures for its AI-powered dictation app
Startups developing voice AI technology and applications are having their moment. Model builders like ElevenLabs and Cartesia have raised millions of dollars in the last few months. Applications such as AI-powered notetaker Granola, and meeting tools Read AI and Fireflies AI have also received investor attention and backing. Continuing the trend, dictation app Wispr Flow announced today that it is raising $30 million in Series A funding from Menlo Ventures with participation from NEA, 8VC, Opal CEO Kenneth Schlenker, Pinterest Founder Evan Sharp, Carta CEO Henry Ward, and Lindy CEO Flo Crivelli. Menlo's Matt Kraning, who also backed the company as an angel investor, will join its board. To date, the company has raised $56 million. The startup's founder and CEO, Tanay Kothari, started building Wispr to create a device that would allow users to type just by mouthing words silently. Its prior funding was for that business. Last year, the company instead started focusing on Wispr Flow, the software interface designed for the hardware device. The company released a Mac app in October 2024, followed by a Windows app in March 2025, and an iOS app earlier this month. Kothari mentioned that, since its early release, VCs in Silicon Valley have been using the product. 'I think every single tier one venture fund in the valley uses Wispr Flow for their emails, memos, documents, and more. They feel themselves being hooked on it, and it is one of the products they use every day. Because of this, we started getting a lot of inbound,' Kothari said about investor interest. Notably, Granola also had a similar story of receiving immense investor interest because VCs used their product a lot. Startup's CEO Tanay Kothari Image Credits: WisPr Flow Kothari also noted that the startup will soon achieve profitability at the current rate of growth, and initially, he didn't want to raise money. However, he worried that big tech players with a massive distribution advantage could be a risk to the company. He wanted to multiply the company's revenue and reach rapidly, and decided to take the investment. Kraning, who has been an avid user of the app, said that his initial thesis for Wispr Flow was that with the current set of input methods, like keyboards, we are 'waiting for our thumbs to catch up with our thoughts.' 'Wispr Flow is creating an efficient way to translate digital thoughts and intent. The app captures users' speech and what they want to convey very well. The team has thought about how people speak while developing models rather than focusing on things like word error rates,' he told TechCrunch. User growth and future roadmap The startup said that the app has been growing its user base by 50% month-over-month. Kothari noted that 40% of users of the app are in the U.S., 30% in Europe, and 30% in other parts of the world. In addition, more than 30% of the app's users are from a non-technical background. 'More and more people are using AI tools, but still, there isn't a good interface for people who are not techies. ChatGPT-style interface is the most common one, and that was released three and a half years ago. We are building for all kinds of users so they don't have to write system prompts to interface with AI,' Kothari said. At the moment, Wispr Flow supports dictation in 104 languages. Kothari said that 40% of dications are in English, and 60% of them are in the rest of the languages, with Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Hindi, and Mandarin being the top languages. The company will use the funding to grow its team of 18 with roles in engineering and go-to-market. It will also release an Android app and cater to Enterprise users by setting up company-wide phrase context and support teams. The startup is working on building Flow into a product that is akin to an AI-powered assistant that knows more about your personal context and helps you do everyday tasks like send messages, take notes, and set reminders. Plus, the company said it's working with some AI hardware partners, without naming them, to power the interaction layer.
