SoundHound AI's (SOUN 1.83%) shares surged by nearly 875% in 2024 mainly due to record third-quarter revenue performance and increasing adoption of the company's conversational AI solutions by major brands across industries. The stock also benefited significantly from a bullish report from Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who raised the company's target price from $10 to $22.
Palantir Technologies' (PLTR 1.86%) stock posted remarkable gains of almost 385% in 2024, driven by unprecedented demand for its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), strong financial performance, lucrative partnerships, and inclusion in the benchmark S&P 500 index.
While SoundHound AI recorded a much stronger share price performance than Palantir, is it a better or even a comparable investment on a risk-adjusted basis? Let's find out.
Reduced customer concentration risk
SoundHound AI dramatically reduced its overreliance on a small customer base. While the largest customer accounted for 72% of revenue in 2023, the revenue exposure was reduced to only 12% in the third quarter of 2024. Furthermore, the top five customers now account for less than 33% of the company's revenue, far lower than the 90% revenue exposure in 2023.
NASDAQ: SOUN
Key Data Points
SoundHound is seeing increasing momentum in the automotive sector, especially in the electric vehicle (EV) space. The company signed contracts with four new EV players in the third quarter, two of which are using conversational intelligence solutions in real time. SoundHound expanded its contract with Stellantis across multiple markets, with seven of the latter's brands using its generative AI-enhanced digital assistant, SoundHound Chat AI. SoundHound AI is also making its presence felt in the Chinese market through partnerships with DayinTec and a major Chinese multinational technology company. Being the largest EV market with an estimated size of $376.4 billion in 2024, the Chinese EV market can be a major growth catalyst for SoundHound AI in the coming years.
SoundHound is a market leader for phone ordering solutions in the restaurant industry. The company's phone ordering solutions handled over 100 million customer interactions. Multiple prominent brands are adopting SoundHound's drive-thru and phone ordering system.
Finally, SoundHound's AI agent customer service solutions found a solid footing across industries like financial services, healthcare, insurance, and retail. This business segment accounts for over half of the company's revenue.
Polaris model
SoundHound AI built its multimodal, multilingual Polaris foundation model and trained it on billions of real conversations and over 1 million hours of audio across multiple languages. The model has helped improve accuracy and reduce hosting costs -- a solid competitive advantage for a conversational artificial intelligence company. Polaris is already powering almost one-third of all AI interactions for the company's restaurant customers. This trend is expected to strengthen in the coming quarters.
Financial strength
SoundHound AI's financial numbers speak volumes about its improving business momentum. The company expects its 2024 revenue to be between $82 million and $85 million and 2025 revenue to be in the range of $155 million to $175 million. The company expects to be adjusted EBITDA profitable by the end of fiscal 2025.
SoundHound AI also boasts a strong balance sheet with $136 million in cash and $43.8 million in debt at the end of the third quarter.
NASDAQ: PLTR
Key Data Points
Can SoundHound AI be the next Palantir?
Although SoundHound is an exceptional AI-powered company, its financial strength and target addressable markets differ significantly from Palantir's.
SoundHound's revenue jumped by 89% year over year to $25.1 million, while Palantir's revenue was up by 30% year over year to $726 million. While the top-line growth rate of the former is higher, revenue is also much smaller on an absolute basis. Hence, it is obvious that SoundHound is a company experiencing early growth, while Palantir has entered a more stable and mature growth phase.
SoundHound is not yet profitable and reported a generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) operating loss of $33.7 million in the third quarter. On the other hand, Palantir is profitable and posted a GAAP operating income of $113.1 million in the third quarter.
From an operational perspective, government agencies and large commercial organizations deploy Palantir's advanced data analytics and mining offerings mainly for complicated and mission-critical applications. Subsequently, these solutions are deeply entrenched in the client's operations, making it difficult to switch to the competition. The sticky customer base is a major competitive edge for Palantir. Contrarily, SoundHound's voice AI and conversational intelligence applications are used for cases such as restaurant ordering, automotive interface, and customer support.
Although important, these are not integral to the functioning of the business. Hence, some clients can opt for competitors such as Amazon's Alexa, Alphabet's Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana.
While there is huge growth potential for SoundHound AI, it may not be able to replace Palantir in a smart investor's portfolio anytime soon.
