SoundHound AI (Nasdaq: $SOUN) Stock Hub: Record Q2 Revenue of $61.9 Million, the Narrow Guidance Raise, and the LivePerson Vote on August 20

Executive summary

SoundHound sells voice and agentic AI to enterprises through a platform it calls OASYS, launched in May 2026, built on the Amelia technology it acquired in 2024. The business has three revenue engines that behave differently: automotive and IoT licensing, restaurant ordering, and enterprise customer service across healthcare, financial services and telecommunications. Revenue is growing quickly, the company is not profitable on any measure, and the gap between the two is being financed by an at-the-market equity programme rather than by debt.

The quarter itself was strong on the top line and mechanically better on the bottom line. The more consequential fact is that SoundHound is in the final stage of acquiring LivePerson, a company that reported $243.742 million of revenue in 2025 against SoundHound’s $168.920 million. The amount payable to LivePerson’s common shareholders is $42,784,532.64 in SoundHound stock, adjusted downward for any shortfall in LivePerson’s cash balance, which is why the proxy says those holders would end up with roughly 0.9% to 1.5% of the company. That is not the size of the transaction. SoundHound is also settling LivePerson’s first and second lien secured notes in its own shares, and the company’s own pro forma filing puts total estimated consideration at $271.8 million and total shares issued at roughly 42.6 million. Every regulatory condition has been satisfied. The only remaining condition of substance is the LivePerson shareholder vote on August 20.

Three things make this a difficult position to hold with confidence in either direction. The company has raised the floor of its guidance by $5 million while leaving the ceiling where it was, which is a narrower move than the phrase “raises full year outlook” suggests. It is issuing close to a tenth of itself to acquire a business whose revenue is larger than its own but has been shrinking, and integrating it will absorb management attention at a moment when the finance function is being run on an interim basis. And 42.8% of the float is sold short, which means the price reacts to news with a violence that has little to do with the underlying arithmetic. The after-hours move from $6.43 to roughly $8.05 is an illustration of that, not a verdict on the quarter.

The guidance raise, stated precisely

The headline of the release says the company “raises full year outlook”. The specific change is this: on May 7, 2026, reporting first quarter results, SoundHound reaffirmed a full year 2026 revenue range of $225 million to $260 million. On August 5 that range became $230 million to $260 million. The floor moved up by $5 million. The ceiling did not move.

With $106.092 million booked in the first half, the new range implies second half revenue of between $123.9 million and $153.9 million. The lower end of that would be roughly 17% growth over the first half; the upper end would be roughly 45%. The company has now delivered $44.2 million and $61.9 million in consecutive quarters, so the low end of its own range implies a slowdown from the current run rate and the high end implies continued sequential acceleration.

The release also states that guidance does not include LivePerson, and that SoundHound “plans to update its guidance accordingly” once that transaction closes, which it expects before the end of 2026. Any comparison between the current outlook and a post-close outlook will therefore not be like for like.

Five quarters of revenue

The pattern is a business with a pronounced fourth quarter and a first quarter that gives some of it back, growing through the cycle. The sequential jump from $44.2 million to $61.9 million is the largest in the series and is the reason the stock moved after hours. It is also the reason the unchanged ceiling on guidance reads oddly: a company that has just posted its largest sequential increase and left the top of its range untouched is either being conservative or is seeing something in the second half that the range is designed to absorb.

What SoundHound actually sells

The platform

SoundHound’s current product framing is OASYS, launched in May 2026 and announced alongside first quarter results on May 7, described by the company as a self-learning, orchestrated agentic AI system on which organisations build and deploy conversational agents that carry out transactions, tasks and workflows. Underneath it sits the technology from Amelia, the enterprise conversational AI business SoundHound acquired in 2024, plus the company’s own speech and language stack, which it says is backed by more than 400 patents. On July 13, 2026 Gartner placed SoundHound as a Leader in its 2026 Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI Platforms.

The three revenue engines

Automotive and IoT is the oldest business: voice assistants embedded in vehicles and consumer devices, sold to manufacturers, with revenue recognised over the life of the units shipped. In the second quarter Stellantis increased unit adoption and added live generative AI, Hyundai expanded unit adoption of the same capability, and the company signed what it describes as a seven-figure deal with a major automotive infotainment software company in China plus a new agreement with an unnamed automotive brand for in-car voice commerce transactions.

Restaurants is the most visible: drive-thru and phone ordering. In the quarter the company reported continued expansion with Five Guys, IHOP and Jersey Mike’s, said an unnamed pizza brand is now live in more than 75% of its locations, signed Ruby Tuesday for both Smart Answering and Smart Ordering, and renewed Habit Burger, Red Lobster and Torchy’s Tacos. On July 23, 2026 Deliverect, a restaurant order-management platform, announced a partnership to route SoundHound voice orders into kitchens through its certified point-of-sale integrations.

Enterprise customer service is where the growth narrative now sits: healthcare, financial services, insurance and telecommunications. The quarter included a seven-figure deal with a nationally ranked health system employing 30,000 people, renewals with Rakuten Securities and a British multinational telecoms operator present in fifteen countries, and, announced separately on July 29, 2026, the expansion of MUSC Health’s “Emily” agent into retail and specialty pharmacies, a deployment the company says has handled more than 2.2 million patient calls since 2024.

Channel

Two channel agreements were disclosed for the quarter: a multi-year partnership with a Latin American company described as an initial eight-figure deal covering a network spanning more than twenty countries, and a partner agreement with a global IT services and consulting firm. Neither counterparty is named.

What LivePerson brings, and what it costs to carry

On a pro forma basis for the year ended December 31, 2025, combining SoundHound’s historical $168.920 million, a further $42.781 million of revenue from Interactions, the business SoundHound acquired on September 3, 2025, and LivePerson as adjusted at $243.742 million, revenue would have been $455.443 million. LivePerson alone would have contributed more than half of it.

That is the case for the deal in one line and the risk in the same line. A business generating $243.7 million of annual revenue is not being sold at this price because it is healthy. LivePerson’s secured notes are being converted into equity rather than repaid in cash, its common equity is worth a rounding error relative to its revenue, and the merger agreement contains a mechanism that reduces the consideration if LivePerson arrives at closing with less cash than a defined threshold, set at $74 million or $71 million depending on timing, less any 2026 convertible notes repurchased since April 1.

The pro forma combined balance sheet shows total assets of approximately $1.016 billion. On the operating side, the pro forma adjustments reduce combined sales and marketing by $17.3 million and research and development by $15.9 million while increasing cost of revenues by $7.6 million and general and administrative by $7.1 million, which is the shape of an integration that is expected to remove overlapping commercial and engineering cost rather than to grow the combined top line immediately.

Cash, burn and how the gap is being financed

The company carries no debt, and the current ratio is 3.91, calculated from $277.045 million of current assets against $70.875 million of current liabilities. Against that, operating activities consumed $59.969 million in the first half of 2026, up from $43.682 million in the first half of 2025, and investing activities consumed a further $32.727 million, of which $26.501 million was a payment related to an asset acquisition and $5.404 million was capitalised software development.

The financing side is where the shares come from. In the first half SoundHound raised $48.481 million in gross proceeds from sales of Class A common stock under its Second Equity Distribution Agreement, paying $970 thousand of associated costs, and took in $3.923 million from option exercises and the employee stock purchase plan. It also paid $3.538 million to settle contingent acquisition liabilities and $1.000 million to settle deferred holdback liabilities.

Put plainly: the operating business consumed about $60 million of cash in six months, the at-the-market programme supplied about $48 million of it, and the balance came out of the existing cash pile. That is a functioning arrangement while the equity market is receptive and the share price is high enough to make sales efficient. It is a structural dependency, not a one-off, and it is the reason share count is the number to watch alongside revenue.

Short interest, and why the reaction was violent

Short interest stood at 42.80% of the float as of the most recent data available at the August 5 close, on a float of 395.33 million shares, with a short ratio of 5.70 days of average volume. Beta is 2.81 and average daily volume is 29.7 million shares.

Those numbers are the mechanical explanation for a 25% after-hours move on a quarter that beat on revenue and raised the floor of guidance by $5 million. At more than 40% of the float short, any result that removes a near-term reason to be short forces covering into a market with thin after-hours depth. The move says something about positioning and very little about valuation.

They also cut the other way. The same positioning means disappointing news, a delayed close, an unfavourable vote or a guidance reset after the merger would be amplified in the opposite direction. A 42.8% short float is not a bullish indicator or a bearish one; it is a statement that the stock will not move proportionally to the information.

Management and the open CFO seat

Keyvan Mohajer, co-founder, remains chief executive. James Hom, also a co-founder and the chief product officer, has been interim chief financial officer since April 3, 2026, when Nitesh Sharan left for a leadership role at a quantum computing company. The company announced the transition on March 18, 2026, said Sharan would stay on as an adviser and that an executive search firm had been engaged for a permanent successor. As of August 6, 2026 no appointment has been announced.

This matters more than it usually would. A company closing an acquisition that adds more revenue than it currently generates, integrating a second acquisition completed in September 2025, running a continuous at-the-market equity programme and carrying a mark-to-market earn-out liability is asking a great deal of a finance function led on an interim basis by an executive whose primary role is product. It is a specific, checkable thing to watch rather than a criticism: the announcement of a permanent CFO, or its continued absence through the close, is information.

Catalysts to monitor

The two cases, stated as fairly as possible

Scenario framework

These are analytical frameworks for organising what to watch, not forecasts, targets or recommendations.

Merlintrader bottom line

The second quarter was a genuinely strong revenue print and a mechanically better loss. The 45% growth is real, the $61.9 million is a record, and the improvement in GAAP gross margin from 39.0% to 45.1% is the single cleanest number in the release. Set against that: the operating loss improvement disappears once the earn-out mark-to-market is removed from both periods, the non-GAAP gross margin did not move at all, the cash flow table is mislabelled in a way that overstates the quarterly burn, and the guidance raise moved only the floor.

The item that will decide the next six months is not in the quarter. It is the LivePerson merger, and specifically the gap between the $42.8 million figure that circulates and the $271.8 million of estimated consideration and 42.6 million shares in the company’s own pro forma filing. A reader who takes the smaller number away from this transaction has understood it as a bolt-on. It is not one: it is close to a tenth of the company, issued to absorb a business with more revenue than SoundHound has and a capital structure that had to be restructured to make the deal possible.

Everything now runs through three dated, checkable events: the August 20 vote, the ten-day volume-weighted average price that sets the final share count within the $7.00 to $12.00 collar, and the combined guidance that follows the close. Until those land, the after-hours price is a function of a 42.8% short float meeting a revenue beat, and the filings are the only place the arithmetic actually exists.

Primary and reference sources

• Second quarter 2026 results, exhibit 99.1 to the Form 8-K filed August 5, 2026: revenue, margins, GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations, business highlights by vertical, liquidity and the raised full year outlook.
• Condensed consolidated financial statements, exhibit 99.2 to the same Form 8-K: balance sheet at June 30, 2026, statements of operations for the three and six months, and the six-month cash flow statement that reconciles the mislabelled table in the press release.
• Form 8-K filed July 2, 2026: the Amended and Restated Merger Agreement with LivePerson, the $42,784,532.64 Aggregate Consideration Amount, the LivePerson Shortfall Cash mechanism, the $7.00 to $12.00 collar, closing conditions and the $5,000,000 termination fee.
• Unaudited pro forma condensed combined financial information, exhibit 99.1 to the Form 8-K filed July 13, 2026: the $271.8 million estimated preliminary consideration, the 42,633,300 share table, the secured note settlement at the $7.00 floor, the collar sensitivity analysis and pro forma combined 2025 revenue of $455.443 million.
• Form 8-K filed July 24, 2026: receipt of the final foreign investment clearance in Bulgaria on July 20, 2026, and confirmation that all regulatory approval conditions to closing are satisfied.
• LivePerson definitive proxy statement and prospectus, filed July 9, 2026: the August 20, 2026 special meeting at 10:00 a.m. ET, the July 6, 2026 record date, 12,332,427 shares outstanding, approximately 2,169,063 TASE shares and the 0.9% to 1.5% pro forma ownership range for LivePerson common holders.
• First quarter 2026 results, filed May 7, 2026: revenue of $44.2 million, cash of $216 million at March 31, and the reaffirmed $225 million to $260 million full year range that was revised on August 5.
• Fourth quarter and full year 2025 results, filed February 26, 2026: fourth quarter revenue of $55.059 million, full year revenue of $168.920 million and cash of $248 million at December 31, 2025.
• Gartner Magic Quadrant recognition, July 13, 2026, and the MUSC Health pharmacy expansion, July 29, 2026.
• Deliverect and SoundHound partnership, issued by Deliverect on July 23, 2026.
• CFO transition announcement, March 18, 2026: Nitesh Sharan’s departure effective April 3, 2026 and James Hom’s appointment as interim chief financial officer.
• Full EDGAR filing history, CIK 0001840856, and SoundHound AI investor relations.

Share price, market capitalisation, float, short interest, ownership percentages, beta, average volume, performance figures and the analyst consensus are from an independent market data provider as of the August 5, 2026 close, with the after-hours level taken from the same provider’s intraday series. All company financial data, share counts, consideration amounts and transaction terms come from SoundHound’s and LivePerson’s SEC filings and from the companies’ own press releases.

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Educational disclaimer

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. It has been prepared in line with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission guidance on financial publishing and does not create any adviser relationship. Companies with negative earnings, heavily shorted equities, continuous at-the-market equity programmes and pending mergers subject to shareholder approval can be highly volatile and risky, and a pending transaction may be delayed, amended or abandoned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence, review official company filings and consult a qualified financial adviser where appropriate. The author and Merlintrader are not acting as registered investment advisers or broker-dealers. All scenarios are analytical frameworks, not predictions or guarantees. Market prices, filings, ownership data, analyst views and company fundamentals can change quickly, and figures quoted here are accurate as of August 6, 2026.

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