Earnings Call Transcript
SOUNDHOUND AI, INC. (SOUN)
Earnings Call Transcript - SOUN Q3 2024
Operator, Operator
Hello, and thank you for standing by. I would like to welcome you to the SoundHound Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would like to turn the conference over to Scott Smith, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Scott Smith, Head of Investor Relations
Good afternoon and thank you for joining our third quarter 2024 conference call. With me today is our CEO, Keyvan Mohajer; and our CFO, Nitesh Sharan. We will begin with some short remarks before moving to Q&A. We would also like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call. Actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our forward-looking statements. Please refer to our filings with the SEC for a detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could affect our business and for discussion statements that qualify as forward-looking statements. In addition, we may discuss certain non-GAAP measures. Please refer to today's press release for more detailed financial results and further details on the definitions, limitations and uses of those measures and reconciliations from GAAP to non-GAAP. Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Finally, this call is being audio webcast in its entirety on our Investor relations website. An audio replay will be available following today's call. With that, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO, Keyvan Mohajer. Please go ahead, Keyvan.
Keyvan Mohajer, CEO
Thank you, Scott, and thank you to everyone for joining the call today. This quarter, we have seen an acceleration of our mission to voice-enable the world with conversational intelligence. We have extended our AI engine customer service offering into hundreds of more brands. We are seeing strong demand across all businesses. We increased revenue by 89% year-over-year and exceeded $25 million in a quarter for the first time ever. We achieved a run rate of over 6 billion queries annualized, up over 100% year-over-year, and that's excluding the impact of our recent acquisition. We are thrilled to be setting records. While we are seeing massive success in our business, our vision has not wavered. We are pioneering the business evolution of AI founded on our two predictions. First, voice is becoming the preferred way for users to interact with billions of devices and is finally meeting the science fiction quality expectations. Users are adopting it enthusiastically, and product creators can embrace it with just a small inexpensive microphone and a partner like SoundHound. Second, AI customer service will become as necessary to all businesses as Wi-Fi and electricity. Thanks to the incredible strides Voice AI has made in recent years, we believe users will prefer to have their questions and transactions handled by a consistent, accurate conversational AI agent rather than by a human. SoundHound is a leader in enterprise conversational AI and we are reaching scale as a pure play AI software company, significantly expanding into new verticals with our AI agent customer service solutions embedded deep in hundreds of enterprise brands. Moreover, our swift expansion is into end markets that are projected to grow massively over the coming years. So not only are we growing fast, but the markets we operate in are also growing fast. And just as exciting, our broader addressable market is expanding rapidly. The business in the third quarter demonstrated our incredible scale. We are building an ecosystem with customers and partners that are increasing their usage of our technology. The breadth of our portfolio is growing and we have seen a massive shift in the way businesses are talking about AI. For most companies, AI adoption is no longer an exploration within their innovation budget, it is a mandate. We are in a position of strength and building a moat with our integrations and arbitration engine across multiple LLMs. Most importantly, our biggest differentiator is our technology, which is becoming more penetrated in the market with more businesses, more consumers, and a growing ecosystem of partners. Our AI agents for customer service now span multiple industries and offer solutions that drive efficiencies for companies by improving both employee and customer experience. For employees, we have best-in-class agent-led HR and IT solutions. For companies looking to deliver the very best experience to customers, our AI agents can answer queries and initiate all kinds of transactions. This is substantiated by the customers we work with. For example, AeroMexico, American Heritage Credit Union, Aveanna Healthcare, BNP Paribas, Hoffman Financial Group, Nordic Bank, Resorts World Las Vegas, and Sterling National Bank, among hundreds of others. We also work with financial services organizations of all sizes, from regional banks to credit unions to seven out of the top 10 financial institutions globally. These customers are using our AI agents for various tasks, including flight bookings, bank transfers, health queries, hotel reservations, and more. Our automotive portfolio continues to grow, and we are seeing strong traction in the EV space. We won a large deal with a new and up-and-coming EV OEM in the Middle East this quarter. In total, we have signed four EVs and two of them already have our technology live on the road. We continue to show momentum with Stellantis in various markets, but more importantly, seven of their brands have now rolled out our Generative AI-enhanced digital assistant, SoundHound Chat AI, with Lancia in Europe being the latest. This technology was the first of its kind solution, leveraging the strength of Generative AI to delight drivers and increase the usage of voice technology within the car. This has driven strong usage growth over the past two quarters. Our technology has broken through, and we are seeing tremendous interest from other brands that we hope to announce very soon. We've also won new partnerships that increase our presence significantly in the Chinese market. We have partnered with DayinTec, one of the leading Tier 1 software suppliers to automotive manufacturers in China. Additionally, we are beginning another partnership with one of the largest Chinese multinational technology companies in the world, supporting their focus on China's accelerating automotive industry. This is another great accomplishment for our team as we continue to increase our reach globally. This quarter, we also grew within the Indian market. We signed a new deal with VE Commercial Trucks, a joint venture between Volvo and Eicher, to provide them voice AI assistance. Also, we further expanded our partnership with Kia, adding additional Hindi language capabilities to several models. There is more to come. In a phased manner, we plan to roll out many more languages such as Bangla and Punjabi. Moving on to our AI agent customer service portfolio, I'm very pleased with the way we have grown this business over the course of this year, winning new logos organically, expanding with existing customers, growing our ecosystem of partners, and making smart acquisitions. We have now expanded our enterprise customer brands deep into some major industries like financial services and healthcare, among others. We see opportunities in our pipeline for new verticals such as energy and going deeper into retail. Channel and broader technology partnerships are also critical as we build out our ecosystem. We work with Deloitte, Epic, EXL, Fujitsu, General Dynamics Information Technology, Jack Henry, Kyndryl, NICE, Oracle Cerner, and ServiceNow, among others, making our world-class technology available to a host of businesses across a range of verticals. We have two robust offerings for enterprise AI. First is a sophisticated omnichannel conversational AI solution that allows our customers to power seamless phone and chat experiences for their customers. Second is an AI automation offering that helps enterprise IT leaders manage, resolve, and document thousands of events in their IT infrastructure to dramatically speed resolution time and lower labor costs. It also uses generative AI to build automations and address issues when or before they happen. We often see the opportunity to sell both of these solutions to the same customer, and having this comprehensive full package makes us the partner of choice for many enterprise brands. I wanted to call out a few critical wins we signed this quarter with our AI agent solutions for enterprises. In telecom, Telefonica renewed for another two years, further expanding our strong relationship with them in South America with opportunities to expand further. In healthcare, MUSC Health was signed to deploy an AI agent powered by SoundHound AI's Amelia patient engagement solution to enhance patients' access. In insurance, together with EXL, a trusted partner to offer solutions in insurance, we secured a deal to work with Transamerica. In banking, Truity Credit Union also chose us, adding to our growing number of credit union customers deploying consumer banking. In retail, Turret signed with us to improve the shopping experience for its popular fashion brand. In government and military, together with General Dynamics Information Technology, we renewed a federal government contract within a branch of the US Military. Finally, one of the largest multinational payment card services companies in the world renewed for another three years. Those are some great wins with our enterprise AI agent offering, but we are also excited about our opportunity for SMBs with smart answering. This low touch, highly scalable offering is seeing a strong and growing pipeline that includes individual brands with over 1,000 locations. We estimate this massive TAM to be over 30 million businesses just in North America alone. We have solutions to cover the market from SMBs to enterprise across a growing number of industries, so the opportunity in front of us is very exciting. For restaurants, we continue to expand our offering across drive-thru phone ordering and support for their staff with Employee Assist. Our drive-thru solutions continue to penetrate new brands and expand with existing ones. While our customers realize efficiencies during the ordering process for their customers, they are also excited about the upsell per order our solution is creating for them. We power the AI drive-thru for Panda Express in dozens of locations in multiple states and continue to add new locations. We just went live with Church's Texas Chicken, and the feedback from the restaurant staff is incredible. They are delighted with how much faster they're able to accept orders. We continue to expand in more locations with White Castle. Our earliest drive-thru customer is also our largest deployment. Last quarter, we implemented innovations related to speeding up the hardware deployments that we believe can help us scale even faster going forward. Because of our tech and ability to navigate different languages and acoustic variations, we already have drive-thru locations in three continents, and we're just getting started. It's also our trusted partners that help make this happen. We are deepening our relationship with hardware and platform partners like HME, Olo, Oracle Micros, Samsung, Sapient, Square, Toast, and others to build out a scalable package solution that can improve the speed of rollout over time. The demand for our phone ordering continues to accelerate. We just recently signed yet another top 10 QSR brand in pizza, which makes for three of the top pizza brands globally that we now have as customers. Of late, we are also seeing demand from brands to power their mobile apps. This is such a powerful and convenient modality for many consumers, and we are excited to have signed a new enterprise restaurant brand to power their native consumer-facing mobile application with voice AI, which includes ordering and business query functionality. As off-premise ordering continues to grow, we see mobile-based voice AI ordering as an emerging channel, further increasing our addressable market. Whether drive-thru, phone ordering, kiosks, mobile apps, or even adding efficiencies in the kitchen with Employee Assist, we are seeing tremendous demand from coffee shops to some of the premier QSR burger and chicken restaurants in the world. Some of the wins this quarter include Torchy's Tacos and a large restaurant chain with hundreds of stores that serves home-style food and sells unique retail products. We also expanded within existing customers. We had franchise wins with Firehouse Subs, Five Guys, Panda Express, Beef 'O' Brady's, as well as one of our larger pizza chains. With Applebee's, we are now penetrated in two-thirds of their locations, adding to the expansion we see every quarter with Chipotle and Casey's to remain fully implemented in other locations. Our AI customer service product portfolio is resonating with businesses of all sizes. We are the market leader in phone ordering solutions for restaurants. Additionally, we are proud to say that our phone ordering solutions have crossed the milestone of handling 100 million interactions. That's more than 100 million inbound customer calls exclusively with AI. With that, I wanted to share with you some of our trusted brands that have been using our solutions along the way. Chipotle, Casey's, Applebee's, Jersey Mike's, Firehouse Subs, Five Guys, Habit Burger, Noodles & Co, MOD Pizza, California Pizza Kitchen, Corner Bakery, Blaze Pizza, McAlister's Deli, Schlotzsky's, Cafe Zupas, and Blake's Lotaburger. Basically, you can go Monday through Sunday using SoundHound Voice AI solutions to get anything from burritos to burgers or pizzas to pies with speed and convenience. We own our tech, have hundreds of patents, have data from real interactions, and nearly 20 years of experience. We believe we are winning because of the data science and machine learning behind our solutions. We have built a competitive moat with our proprietary technology, creating a massive opportunity in customer service. I'm also happy to announce today that we will have a prominent presence at CES 2025 in January. There, we will be showcasing several automotive technologies and AI solutions, some for the very first time. This will include our work with NVIDIA to bring voice generative AI to the edge without cloud connectivity. Our live demonstration at CES will show how the solution empowers automakers to enhance in-car experiences by bringing the intelligence of cloud-based LLMs directly into vehicles. We will demonstrate how drivers can have meaningful interactions with an in-car assistant using voice generative AI, as well as seamless access to efficient car control capabilities that understand context without the need for cloud connectivity. We believe technology like this will ultimately redefine the way drivers interact with their cars, setting a new standard for the driver experience. We will also demonstrate at CES 2025 what we believe will be the voice commerce ecosystem of the future. We are creating a new category altogether and are excited to share with all of you the dynamic and convenient ways for people to do voice commerce, from ordering food to buying tickets, making appointments, and completing a range of other transactions just by speaking naturally from an ecosystem of devices that we power. More details to come. We look forward to participating this year at CES 2025. Before closing, I wanted to give an update on our Polaris foundation model, our multimodal, multilingual foundation model that elevates our proprietary automatic speech recognition technology to the next level. Polaris is built on two decades of work. It has learned from billions of real conversations and over a million hours of audio in dozens of languages that SoundHound has carefully accumulated over the years. We've been rolling out Polaris in production, and the results are exceptional. We are seeing impressive increases in accuracy while also reducing hosting costs, and because we built it ourselves, we can adapt and improve efficiently and with minimal human effort. I'm delighted to say that Polaris is now powering approximately one-third of all AI interactions that SoundHound handles for restaurant customers, and we expect this exceptional SoundHound-developed technology will soon be the AI engine to power all our customer experiences. As we continue to develop Polaris, we will also release several groundbreaking features that will continue to revolutionize the way our technology understands speech, intent, and the full meaning of conversational exchanges. This exciting engineering innovation keeps us at the cutting edge of conversational AI and allows us to deliver consistently superior technology to our customer base. In closing, we have a winning position in all pillars of our business. In automotive, we continue to take market share. We see ourselves ahead of the competition in the adoption of generative AI technologies and AI in the cloud. We are leading in the EV space and with new companies that are choosing their technology partners to bring innovative products to the world. This speaks to our technology and offerings. In customer service, our AI agent offerings are now more than half of our business and growing at a rapid rate. We are working with premier Fortune 500 enterprise brands and adding major system integrator partners to catalyze our business growth. We've had a consistent vision over the years, and that vision is now being noticed more than ever before. Companies, partners, stakeholders, and most importantly, users of our technology are realizing the amazing experiences we've created. We are grateful to all the collaboration and engagement to all who play a role in our continued joint success, especially our amazing team. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Nitesh to talk about our financial performance, key growth drivers, and business outlook.
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Thank you, Keyvan, and good afternoon, everyone. Q3 revenue increased by 89% year-over-year. We had over $25 million in revenue this quarter, once again exceeding 50% growth, and we are just getting started. Before we dive into the financials for the quarter, let me contextualize how we view the shifting technology landscape and what we are building here. We believe natural language conversations will be the next major interface in how humans interact with technology, and generative AI and LLMs are catalyzing that opportunity at an exponential pace. In this new world order, we believe Voice AI is the killer app. This is a generational shift. We are building a foundation for the next five, 10, and 20 years. Our heritage and innovation uniquely position us to succeed. The basis of our capital activities and investments this year, in particular, have been to set ourselves up for the shifting reality. As we gear up to finish 2024 and transition into 2025, it is with this lens that we organize and align ourselves. Our financial position remains strong. Throughout 2024, our capital position has been a source of strength, and we want to maintain that strength because it affords us the opportunity to grow, invest strategically, extend our reach, and deepen our customer footprint. Our cumulative subscriptions and bookings backlog metric is a measure of customer activity and gives value to our current customer contracts. It continues to grow as we further deepen our automotive partnerships and scale the restaurant business. Excluding the Amelia acquisition, it is double what we reported in the prior year period again this quarter, and its inclusion substantially increases our enterprise customer base. The Amelia team utilizes their own measure of bookings, and we are midstream in aligning all our key metrics. Suffice to say, this expansion into financial services, banking, healthcare, insurance, and more has a meaningful broadening to our customer portfolio and book of business. As one quick measure, if we combined on a like-for-like basis this metric across the full enterprise, we would now be talking about a customer metric in excess of $1 billion, with a duration of approximately six years. That said, when we report our annual results early next year, we will share more on the most appropriate metrics to describe how we are making progress collectively and comprehensively. With that, let me now discuss our third quarter financials in more detail. Q3 revenue was $25.1 million, up 89% year-over-year. We continued to see double-digit automotive unit growth and we saw double-digit unit price expansion in the quarter driven by our Generative AI solutions and overall product expansion. As a reminder, we are anniversarying a period where we had significant point-in-time revenue from our largest customer within the automotive business. Thanks to our scale and diversification of customers that contribute more SaaS-like revenue, we have reduced our reliance on such large point-in-time deals. Within restaurants, we have continued to scale with customers, signed meaningful new logos, and further diversified product offerings. We now count seven of the top 20 quick service restaurants as customers. The quarter also benefited from the acquisition, and at a company level, we have a much more diversified customer geographic and industry base. One key measure of that is customer concentration. Last year, we reported that 72% of our revenue came from one customer, and now that number has improved to just 12% this quarter. Expressed another way, last year our top five customers represented over 90% of our business. This year, our top five comprises less than a third. This was an area of risk highlighted by investors in the past, and so it seemed important to emphasize the tremendous diversification we have experienced over the past 12 months. In Q3, our gross margin was 49%, down year-over-year due to the impact of the business mix from recent acquisitions, which we expect will deliver significant value over time. Adjusted for non-cash amortization of purchase intangibles, our non-GAAP gross margin was 60%. While the acquired businesses weigh on our margins, they provide deep customer relationships and essential enterprise-grade data assets. We anticipate margin recovery as we realize synergies from cloud data center migration, tech stack integration, and cost rationalization. Additionally, meaningful reductions in inference costs provide a favorable tailwind for our deployments. R&D expenses were $19.5 million in Q3, reflecting a 53% year-over-year increase, primarily driven by our acquisitions. We are committed to delivering innovative products that exceed our customers' expectations and that enhance their experiences. Our focus includes advancing our voice AI engines, integrating leading LLM architectures to elevate our offerings, and investing in high-impact innovations such as the Polaris initiative, which, as Keyvan mentioned, is an exciting breakthrough not only for SoundHound, but for the industry as a whole. With efficient model training as a priority, we are well positioned to pioneer next-generation solutions that push boundaries and deliver measurable results. Sales and marketing expenses were $8.4 million in Q3, an increase of 87% year-over-year. The increase is primarily due to the impact from acquisitions. This quarter, we also continued to invest in go-to-market both across restaurants and automotive in both indirect and direct. Our emphasis continues to be in demand generation, lead generation, and improving close rates with speed and efficiency. G&A expenses were $17 million in Q3, an increase of 146% year-over-year. The increase is primarily due to acquisitions, in particular related to transactional costs that are one-time in nature. Note that these are excluded from adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP earnings. The increase in G&A also continues to reflect growing investments in system and process improvements and enhancements to internal controls, ultimately to drive better standardization and cost efficiencies. Non-cash employee stock compensation was $9.1 million, and non-cash amortization of intangibles was $5.1 million in Q3. As a result, our operating loss for Q3 was $33.8 million. OI&E was a positive $1.5 million for the quarter. This includes the interest expense of $1.1 million on our debt. We also had a one-time benefit on the tax expense line of approximately $11 million related to the release of valuation allowances related to the Amelia transaction. Note that this one-time benefit is excluded from our reported non-GAAP metrics. Net loss was $21.8 million in the quarter. GAAP net loss per share in Q3 was $0.06. Adjusting for non-cash acquisition-related amortization of purchase intangibles, fair value adjustments, M&A transaction costs, stock-based compensation, and other non-cash items, our non-GAAP EPS loss was $0.04 in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $15.9 million in Q3. The year-over-year increase was driven primarily by strategic acquisitions and growth investments we have been making in the business. Our cash and equivalents as of September 30th was $136 million, and we have $39 million of debt that remains outstanding from our most recent acquisition. Last week, we announced a new at-the-market equity program. We have utilized ATMs previously to provide capital flexibility and improve our balance sheet. The current outstanding debt has roughly 15% annual cost, so we believe there are economic savings to achieve. We will be thoughtful about when we execute on the program, and as I have said before, our capital position is strong, and we do not need incremental capital to achieve a breakeven operating profile. With that, let me discuss our financial outlook. We now expect 2024 revenue to be in a range of $82 million to $85 million. While we will share more details regarding 2025 in our next earnings call, we thought it would be helpful to lay out an early view. We continue to scale our automotive, AI agent, and restaurant businesses. We are integrating the acquisitions and we see significant revenue synergies, and we expect to drive meaningful opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across the full portfolio. As such, we expect revenue for 2025 to be in a range of $155 million to $175 million. We also expect to drive cost synergies and continue to rationalize our portfolio to capitalize on the most meaningful investment opportunities. One of our biggest priorities is ensuring we continue to operate with agility and urgency. We want to make sure we aren't shortchanging opportunities either, so we will balance moving fast to capture market opportunities with driving efficiencies to move towards profitability. In accordance, we expect to achieve adjusted EBITDA profitability by the end of 2025. I'd like to close by emphasizing factors that underpin our financials, which may not be obvious on the surface. Over the past year, we have meaningfully diversified our customer base, product set, and industry and geographic coverage. We have solidified the capital base and extended our reach into what is clearly generational and foundational technological shifts that are only just beginning. Another way to view this is that we are steadily derisking our financial profile while concurrently accelerating growth vectors. That certainly doesn't suggest we aren't elevated beta as we are fundamentally a disruptor. It does, though, portend that we are better situated to drive sustainable alpha for the long term. I have said several times before that our pathway will not always be linear. That is partly by design because we are thinking exponentially. Thank you. And now we will move to Q&A.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson. Your line is now open.
Gil Luria, Analyst
Good afternoon. Three months ago, when you announced the Amelia acquisition, you talked about the fact that you were looking at various parts of the business to decide which ones you're going to incorporate into the future SoundHound and there was a possibility that you may want to discontinue some of those businesses that you had acquired. With the three months of work and perspective on that, can you give us a sense of how much of the Amelia business you're going to be retaining, how much you may be discontinuing, and then what the accounting is going to be for that?
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Sure, we're currently evaluating the situation, and it's been just three months since we started. We’ve learned a lot and are bringing the team together. There's a lot we're excited about moving forward, including cross-sell and upsell product opportunities. We plan to integrate our technology stacks further. To address your question about composition, it includes several elements, particularly regarding the future of the agent space, where we have strong integrations that we intend to accelerate. We're focusing on high-margin, deep integrations and engaging with customers about those. One key opportunity we've identified is in voice enablement with our proprietary technology, replacing third-party solutions, which we are committed to enhancing. We also see potential in an employee-facing solution called AIOps, where we plan to invest more significantly to deepen our engagement with enterprise brands through comprehensive solutions. There are two areas we’re still considering: professional services and escalation support. Professional services will be approached strategically, focusing on how and where to deepen integrations with large enterprises that handle numerous interactions. We see potential for positive returns and aim to standardize these services over time to improve margins. Regarding escalation support, it's currently lower margin, and we must determine how to benefit from our direct customer interactions and the enterprise-grade data we acquire through that. This will help us refine our models quickly for better customer delivery. While I don’t have exact numbers on the upcoming adjustments yet, we’ve provided a range for next year as we continue this assessment. It will depend on specific industries and customers. Ultimately, our goal is to evolve into a software-focused business, as deploying software is simpler. We are particularly focused on establishing tighter integrations in areas like the restaurant sector to speed up our processes. We'll provide updates each quarter to keep you informed on our progress.
Gil Luria, Analyst
Yeah. Appreciate it. And then the second question, I'd like to talk about the technology. If you're talking about a foundational model, could you help us understand how you benchmark that model and what the important benchmarks are? How many parameters was it trained on? How big of a cluster of GPUs? What specific benchmarks and what other models are you comparing it to assess how much it can contribute to making your products better?
Keyvan Mohajer, CEO
Thank you for your question. We have been developing models for nearly twenty years, accumulating a vast amount of data for both training and evaluation. In addition to standardized tests, we also utilize more challenging assessments from real-life interactions to gauge our performance accurately. We work with benchmarks in speech recognition and natural language understanding. For speech recognition, common metrics include word error rate, latency, and speed. We are one of the few companies with in-house speech recognition technology, and we consistently outperform major tech competitors in both accuracy and speed. In the realm of natural language understanding, the focus has shifted with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). Previously, metrics centered around intent recognition, but now we emphasize minimizing hallucinations, as LLMs can misunderstand information. OpenAI, one of our vendors, showcases innovations in consumer applications, achieving remarkable results around 70% to 80% of the time, while their audience is more tolerant of errors. In contrast, our enterprise audience expects higher precision and cannot accept a 20% to 30% rate of hallucination. We devote significant effort to incorporating our proprietary technology and innovations to minimize these inaccuracies. Our aim is complete reliability, and SoundHound excels in this area due to our experience and extensive data. Regarding GPU costs, we have invested heavily in data collection and model development over the years. While a new company would need to secure significant funding to begin, we have already made those investments. However, we are progressively increasing our GPU expenditure to enhance our existing models.
Gil Luria, Analyst
Got it. Thank you very much.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Scott Buck of H.C. Wainwright & Co. Your line is now open.
Scott Buck, Analyst
Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First of all, I want to say I appreciate the breakout by kind of industry vertical that you included in the release. But I'm curious as you look towards '25 and the opportunities within each one of those, what your capacity looks like and maybe how you're moving or allocating resources between restaurants and kind of broader retail or auto. Any kind of color you could provide there would be great.
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Thank you, Scott. We see many opportunities and our long-standing relationships with automotive partners continue to expand. We've added new partners, especially in the EV sector, which allows for faster scaling and boosts our confidence. We're focused on enhancing our efforts in this area. Regarding the restaurant business, we are particularly enthusiastic about our opportunities there. We have previously mentioned working with seven of the top 20 quick-service restaurants. Although we currently scope our contracts for deployment in tens or hundreds of locations, many of these chains operate thousands of locations, revealing significant potential for growth. Consistency in menu options and achieving an order completion rate of over 85 percent enables scalability, especially in drive-thru operations. We've discussed this for several quarters, and the restaurant opportunity remains very promising for us. Additionally, in new industries, partnering with large enterprises, such as major banks or financial institutions, presents high-volume opportunities for both employee and customer-facing solutions. This includes the integration of our AI solution, AIOps, into companies' internal technology systems, which can expand our presence within their IT budgets. In the medium term, we are also excited about opportunities in healthcare, where we are collaborating with various insurance companies and medical practices to streamline appointment scheduling and patient reports. The healthcare sector is vast and growing in demand. Overall, we are a horizontal platform aiming for more voice-first interactions while also adopting an omnichannel approach. Our solutions, such as Smart Answering, can be effectively applied across various industries, presenting numerous opportunities in restaurants, financial services, and healthcare. Our goal is to deploy technology across these sectors and achieve greater scalability.
Scott Buck, Analyst
Great. I appreciate all that detail, Nitesh. My second question is about the increased outlook. Is this increase coming directly from one of the acquisitions, from the legacy business, or is it a combination of both that is driving this higher for the fourth quarter and 2025?
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
It's a combination of the two, both separately, but also them coming together. We continue to be really excited about just even in answering your prior question, like the automotive business has a lot more scale opportunity. We're still a smaller share of the total market. We're disrupting the major incumbent player and gaining share all the time. We think there's a lot more that we can deploy and grow. On the restaurant side, I mentioned that we're already with enough partners to really get a ton of organic growth just from those partnerships. But we're adding more and more all the time and scaling units across. And then with respect to the acquisitions, the cross-sell and upsell opportunity is tremendous. We absolutely see great opportunity across all of those, both organic and across the M&A.
Scott Buck, Analyst
Great. Well, I appreciate the added color, guys. Thank you for the time.
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Thanks, Scott.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Glenn Mattson of Ladenburg Thalmann. Your line is now open.
Glenn Mattson, Analyst
Hi, thanks for taking my question. Regarding the guidance, I noticed in the filing that for the quarter, it seems you'd be around $40 million if you had Amelia for the entire quarter. Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but if we annualize that, it suggests approximately $160 million for next year. Could you clarify whether that aligns with the midpoint of your range? It seems there might be some cushion or seasonality to consider. Can you help me understand the guidance in relation to that figure?
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Yeah. I think there's a couple of things there. One is, like, we talked about, I think in Gil's question, there are certain things we're actually looking at in terms of how we're going to pursue that going forward and what mix is. It's not just about growth. It's growth and profitability. I also indicated sort of trying to get towards adjusted EBITDA positive. So we're trying to be mindful both of growth and sort of margin profile. But I don't think that's totally off. I think there is still some seasonality in our business, but as we're moving more towards SaaS, a greater share of our business is SaaS. So I think you'll see that stabilize, and hopefully, you won't see it, but we are continuing to grow. If I unpack the guidance this way, sort of at the lower end to the higher end of it, we gave a bit of a range. We want to be prudent in the estimates we're giving out there just so we continue to give ourselves a bit of room to breathe to deliver and outpace and make the right investments for the long term. So all those sort of coming into the calibration around the numbers. I will say you're starting to see some disclosures. We actually had disclosure come out recently with respect to the details of the business. A lot of our acquisitions and for us to get it at the prices that we feel were attractive, there are a lot of things that we have to work on through integration to right-size the ship to invest in the right place to get go-to-market recalibrated. We're doing a lot of that real-time. That's why looking at the past isn't always the best indicator of the future. Those are the things we're driving with the integration. Hopefully that gives you a little more sense of how we're driving it.
Glenn Mattson, Analyst
That's helpful, thanks. Regarding the business side, I believe you mentioned that seven of the top 20 QSRs are now involved. Can you discuss how the process is progressing from winning these larger deployments to the actual implementation? In the past, you've noted that it can be challenging to get all the franchisees on board or to manage the procurement and installation of the equipment. How does that process look for you?
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
There are many variations and different point-of-sale systems and integrations needed. I'm excited about what Keyvan mentioned in the prepared remarks. You're correct; when it comes to franchise locations, we need to have in-depth discussions with franchisees. We've activated and are investing in franchise sales to get the right people, as this sales process differs from acquiring new customers. We're focusing on our major partners with Master Service Agreements who have expansive franchise operations, ensuring we have multiple discussions with support from the corporate side to facilitate deployment. This is an area we're definitely scaling up. Keyvan mentioned White Castle, one of our earliest partners. Recently, our team demonstrated remarkable creativity in addressing hardware challenges and retrofitting many of their locations. In some situations, permits may be required to retrofit drive-thrus, which can take several months or even a year. Our team devised an agile approach with a post and a visual footprint that we could deploy quickly, achieving a high order completion rate and allowing customers to start using our technology promptly. We're innovating in collaboration with several hardware vendors mentioned by Keyvan for headsets and screens, alongside all capabilities necessary for drive-thrus. We are maintaining our pace and aggressively pushing this initiative forward. Compared to last quarter, our learning is ongoing, and the team is moving even faster as we gain insights. Our partnership ecosystem is becoming more robust, and we are confident in our ability to continue scaling. While you didn't specifically ask this, I want to mention that interest and momentum have grown. A year ago, we were sourcing customers, but now we humbly believe we're leading the industry in this area. More restaurant franchises are reaching out to partner with us, and we face the challenge of how to prioritize these opportunities with our limited resources. As we move from discussions with the top 20 to the top 10 and then to the top five, we need to set appropriate expectations. Our aim is to exceed those expectations and delight both our customers and their end consumers. This is a continuous adjustment we're working through. Overall, I feel very optimistic about the momentum we're experiencing. We're investing strategically and believe this aligns perfectly with industry trends for the coming year and beyond. We're truly excited about our progress.
Glenn Mattson, Analyst
That's very helpful, Nitesh. If I could just ask for a quick clarification on the backlog. I believe you mentioned it was double last year, but I don't recall the exact figure from last year since you converted to the new backlog number at some point. Can you provide a specific dollar amount, or is that the only detail?
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Yes. Last year, we reported figures in the mid-300s. After normalizing, it's actually above 400, which I believe wasn’t shared previously. If you do the rough math, you can see the increase. The main point I want to highlight is that we need to align with what Amelia contributes. They have a distinct method of measurement, and we will provide more details next time. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, the combined business is well north of a billion. This indicates great diversification. If I set Amelia aside, the fastest growth continues to be in the restaurant sector as we are signing on more customers and activating more locations. We are still seeing strong performance across various segments of that customer base.
Leo Carpio, Analyst
Good afternoon, gentlemen. First, congratulations on the quarter. I have a couple of questions. The first question is what's your M&A appetite? As you seek to consolidate the voice AI space, any industries or sectors that look appealing, and could you provide a little more color on the energy and retail sector comment? It sounds like you're wanting to explore a bit more deeply in there.
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Sure, Leo. Thank you for the question. I'll address the first part. I may have mentioned previously that I firmly believe having a programmatic approach to mergers and acquisitions is crucial, particularly in fast-paced industries as we navigate new opportunities in generative AI, LLM, and conversational AI. We've already experienced the advantages of forming attractive strategic partnerships with companies like SYNQ3, Allset, and Amelia. Every earnings call reveals just how much stronger we’ve become since our last discussion; we are rapidly expanding our business. This toolset is essential for us, although it doesn’t imply that we are dependent on it or actively pursuing every opportunity. We have a dedicated team and several excellent banking partners, and now, following some successful deals, we are receiving numerous inbound proposals. We remain discerning, as Keyvan and his team have built an incredible technological foundation supported by hundreds of patents and innovative tech. We consistently strive to push the boundaries. The challenge is finding ways to utilize that foundation for quicker growth. Developing strong customer relationships was a key focus for us this year, and we’ve been successful in establishing connections across restaurants and other sectors. We're in a good position but need to be mindful of our next steps as we integrate recent acquisitions. While we aren't currently in active discussions, we will remain open to opportunities and not retreat from the market. Our focus isn't solely on M&A; it's also about understanding potential partners and suppliers in this evolving landscape. This is all part of our strategic planning. As for the second part, we have horizontal solutions that allow us to target various industries. You mentioned energy, and there are other sectors as well that show a strong demand for our conversational agent capabilities. These markets present significant opportunities, with enormous total addressable markets in sectors like healthcare, which is a $10 trillion market, and financial services and energy, both of which are also in the multi-trillion dollar range. These areas are primed for automation, and we will consider them in our planning. Our decisions will always hinge on our capacity and resources while prioritizing growth in areas where our capabilities align best.
Keyvan Mohajer, CEO
We publish that we use OpenAI as one of our vendors and have integrated ChatGPT into our digital assistant in vehicles. We've also shared our architecture, which allows for arbitration across multiple large language models. Many queries are addressed by our own models, but for specific inquiries, we can utilize models like ChatGPT for historical questions. For real-time trends and news, we can turn to models like Perplexity. Our goal is to create an architecture that is largely independent of any particular language model. Additionally, we are in the process of developing our own Polaris foundation model.
Leo Carpio, Analyst
Okay. And then speaking of partnerships, any plans collaborating with the large AI LLM companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, or are there existing relationships with them?
Keyvan Mohajer, CEO
We do publish that we use OpenAI as one of our vendors and have integrated ChatGPT into our digital assistant in cars. We've also shared details about our architecture that allows us to work with multiple language models. Many queries are processed by our own models, but for specific needs, we can utilize ChatGPT for historical questions. For inquiries about real trends and news, we can incorporate models like Perplexity. Our goal has been to create an architecture that is LLM agnostic, and we are also developing our own Polaris foundation model. We are among the top seven out of the twenty leading companies, and that figure has grown significantly from one quarter to the next. We are acquiring new clients and believe we are at the forefront of AI for restaurants. Recently, we announced that we have processed over 100 million inbound calls using AI. Additionally, we previously disclosed our plan to integrate all our services. We provide solutions for automotive and TV products, as well as for restaurants and beyond. We are planning to showcase these customer service solutions integrated into devices at CES. While driving, you can already communicate with your car powered by our AI, asking it to control various functions like navigation, radio tuning, weather updates, stock prices, or sports scores. If we are also managing the AI drive-thru for restaurants, why should you need to physically go there and wait in line? Instead, you should be able to communicate with your car, which will in turn communicate with the restaurant's system. This allows you to place your order ahead of time. We will demonstrate this at CES, and it won’t be limited to just placing food orders; you can also schedule appointments, purchase tickets, and engage in various voice commerce activities.
Nitesh Sharan, CFO
Thank you.
Operator, Operator
Thank you. I'm showing no further questions at this time. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.