SoundHound AI (SOUN 2.92%) could be the poster child for stock volatility in 2025. Shares of the voice and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) company plunged more than 50% during the first few months of the year. By mid-October, SoundHound had fully recovered and was in positive territory year-to-date. However, since then, the stock has fallen roughly 40%.
Such wild swings might not instill confidence in many investors. But could SoundHound AI stock be your ticket to becoming a millionaire?
NASDAQ: SOUN
Key Data Points
Millionaire-maker characteristics
SoundHound AI's volatility could be viewed as a feature rather than a bug. Many stocks that eventually went on to make fortunes for investors were highly volatile. Moreover, SoundHound possesses other characteristics commonly found in millionaire-maker stocks.
For example, the companies whose stocks deliver tremendous gains are often innovators and disruptors. SoundHound AI checks off both boxes. The company's voice AI technology is best-in-class in complex language understanding. SoundHound's intellectual property protection is also robust, with over 220 patents granted to date and more than 100 other patents pending.
Millionaire-makers must have tremendous market opportunities. SoundHound AI estimates that the total addressable market for voice AI is a whopping $140 billion. Management believes that the explosion in the number of connected devices – the Internet of Things – presents an especially significant opportunity for voice AI technology.
Perhaps most importantly, though, millionaire-makers must demonstrate their ability to capitalize on market opportunities. The easiest way to gauge whether a company is effectively seizing its opportunity is through revenue growth.
SoundHound AI delivers on this front. Its revenue soared 68% year over year in the third quarter of 2025 to $42 million. The company's customer base includes automakers such as Honda (HMC +1.50%), Hyundai, and Stellantis (STLA 2.18%), restaurant operators such as Chipotle Mexican Grill (CMG +0.36%) and Five Guys, and technology giants such as Oracle (ORCL +0.54%), Qualcomm (QCOM +0.34%), and Block's (XYZ +0.86%) Square unit.
Image source: Getty Images.
What it would take
What would it take for SoundHound AI to make you a millionaire? The answer depends heavily on the amount of money you invest upfront. It's much easier to turn $500,000 into $1 million than it is to do so with $5,000.
Let's suppose, though, that you have $10,000 to invest. SoundHound AI would have to deliver a 100x return to grow that sum into a cool $1 million.
The company's market cap currently hovers around $5.3 billion. For SoundHound to turn an initial investment of $10,000 into $1 million would require its market cap to soar to roughly $530 billion.
If we use a price-to-sales ratio of 8.8, which is the average multiple for applications software companies, SoundHound AI would need annual revenue in the ballpark of $60 billion to achieve a market cap of $530 billion.
How realistic is this goal? On the one hand, $60 billion in revenue represents approximately 43% of SoundHound AI's total addressable market. On the other hand, it's more than 2,944 times the upper end of the company's revenue guidance for 2025.
Possible but not probable
I think the best way to answer the original question of whether or not SoundHound AI could be your ticket to becoming a millionaire is that it's possible, but not probable. At least, that's true unless you invest a much larger initial amount than $10,000.
That said, SoundHound AI could nonetheless generate substantial returns for investors over the long term. The company is already demonstrating its ability to expand beyond its initial primary focus on the automotive and restaurant industries into energy, financial services, healthcare, retail, telecommunications, and other sectors.
To use a baseball analogy, investing in SoundHound AI might not be the equivalent of hitting a home run. However, it could be like hitting a double. And hitting doubles consistently wins games.
