SoundHound

SoundHound Inc. is an audio and speech recognition company founded in 2005. It develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition and search technologies. Its featured products include Houndify, a Voice AI developer platform, Hound, a voice-enabled digital assistant, and music recognition mobile app SoundHound. The company’s headquarters are in Santa Clara, California.
History.
The company was founded in 2005 by Keyvan Mohajer, an Iranian-Canadian computer scientist who had founded a number of dot com ventures before starting SoundHound.
In 2009, the company's "Midomi" app was rebranded as SoundHound but is still available as a web version on midomi.com. In 2012, SoundHound announced it had over 100 million users globally. In 2014, SoundHound became the first music-search product available as a wearable.
In 2015, SoundHound became the first music recognition service shipping in autos, in a partnership with Hyundai, in the new Genesis model.
By May 2016, SoundHound had over 300 million users globally.
In 2018, SoundHound Inc. announced partnerships with Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz, and Honda to provide voice interaction for their products using its Houndify voice AI platform. 
SoundHound won the 2020 Webby Award for Productivity (Voice) in the category Apps, Mobile & Voice. In June of that year, the company announced partnerships with Snap Inc. as the technology behind Voice Scan in the Snapchat app, and Mastercard to voice-enable their new Drive Through solutions.
Funding.
According to an article of June 2015 SoundHound Inc. had raised a total of $40 million in funding from Global Catalyst Partners, Translink Capital, Walden Venture Capital, and other investors. This included $7 million in a Series B funding round the company secured in October 2008, bringing total funds raised to $12 million at this time. The round was led by TransLink Capital with the participation of JAIC America and Series A investor Global Catalyst Partners. In 2009 it attracted additional funding from Larry Marcus at Walden Venture Capital, who had previously invested in music startups Pandora and Snocap. The $4 million funding round was led by Walden Venture Capital VII, with the participation of an unnamed device manufacturer.
In January 2017, the company raised another $75 million in an investment round that included Nvidia, Samsung, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, and others.
Announced in May 2018, SoundHound raised $100 million from a funding round led by Tencent and joined by Daimler AG, Hyundai Motors, Midea Group, and Orange S.A. With this funding, the valuation of the company reached $1 billion.