Earnings Call Transcript - SOUN Q2 2024

Operator, Operator

Hello, and thank you for standing by. At this time, I would like to welcome you to the SoundHound Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I would now 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 second 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. Before getting into the quarter, I wanted to talk about the announcement we made this morning to acquire a conversational AI leader, Amelia. This transaction is a natural extension of our strategy, and we saw a great opportunity to partner with a company that we believe will accelerate our mission of voice-enabling the world with conversational intelligence. Our vision has always been to create a conversational AI platform that exceeds human capabilities, delivers value and delights end users, creates an ecosystem with billions of products, and enables innovation and monetization opportunities for product creators. Today's announcement is a continuation of that path and now is the time for such a bold move. SoundHound is a leader in voice AI, and we have built a platform that we can perfectly leverage to expand into new markets. Coming together with Amelia is an important step along the way in this journey, and we are excited for a number of reasons. Most importantly, this significantly expands our penetration in conversational AI across new verticals and deep into hundreds of enterprise brands. We are doing this in end markets that are expected to grow massively over the coming years, with enterprise spending on generative AI projected to grow 15-fold over the next three years to nearly $250 billion. Together, we combine decades of experience in conversational AI. We have a highly complementary suite of products, and we believe we can offer best-in-class, scalable customer service support to a vast spectrum of businesses. The announcement today marks a significant and strategic expansion of SoundHound's existing customer service pillar. We are adding even more breadth and depth to this offering that has already seen substantial growth amid the accelerated adoption of voice and conversational generative AI solutions. Nitesh will provide some more insight into this deal and our overall M&A philosophy later on. Now, on to the quarter. Once again, we are reporting strong growth. Second quarter revenue was up 54% and cumulative subscriptions and bookings backlog roughly doubled year-over-year to $723 million. We also saw a steep increase in engagement with our technology. Our annual run rate of queries is now over 5 billion. We continue to see strong demand for our products, including SoundHound Chat AI in pillar one and our AI Customer Service solutions in pillar two. Our value propositions are resonating with the industry. Customers choose us because they believe our innovation cycles are at a high level and result in powerful AI technology. They also know that we help them protect their brand, users, and data. We have accumulated 20 years of intellectual property, and technical innovation remains in our core DNA. Last year, we announced Polaris, our multimodal, multilingual foundation model. Polaris now beats numerous benchmarks against state-of-the-art models in the industry. A growing number of our customers are switching to Polaris. The result is higher accuracy, better user experience, lower internal cost, and faster response times. We can also deliver tuning and customizations much faster. These customizations have historically required long and expensive machine-learning training cycles. With Polaris, we can achieve them with just simple configuration changes. Now, let me discuss some business updates in the second quarter. In pillar one, we now have cars in production in almost 20 markets and support dozens of languages. SoundHound Chat AI, our voice assistant with generative AI, is driving this high demand. DS Automobiles became the first brand to quickly turn a trial run to live production. This was the first in-vehicle assistant with generative AI capabilities to go into production anywhere in the world, and the results have been so well received that Stellantis has continued to integrate SoundHound technology into a large number of models across multiple brands. In total, we are now live on the road with six Stellantis brands: Peugeot, Vauxhall, Opel, Citron, Alfa Romeo, and of course, DS Automobiles. SoundHound Chat AI combines the power of large language models with our AI-assistant, making it more capable and powerful. This is an upsell feature that will increase royalties from existing customers, and our bookings this quarter increased as a result. This is important to emphasize. While historically there have been constant pressure from auto OEMs to lower their costs, for the first time, we are seeing their appetite to pay more. They want to upgrade to SoundHound Chat AI to deliver a much better user experience to their customers, and they're willing to pay the additional royalties to do so. Therefore, we expect our revenue per unit in pillar one will increase over time as more customers adopt the generative AI innovation in SoundHound Chat AI. Last quarter, we talked about being the first company to roll out this technology integrated into vehicles in Japan. And now, this quarter, we are also pleased to have signed a new contract to be the first company to roll out ChatGPT-style capabilities to in-vehicle voice assistants in Latin America. Initially, this will be with three brands and go into production in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. We also continue to gain interest and make progress with EV manufacturers. Earlier this year, we won a deal with a prominent US-based EV maker, which will go live imminently. SoundHound Chat AI will be integrated across its full fleet of market-leading vehicles. This will mark the first US-based OEM to integrate an assistant with generative AI capabilities. Additionally, we have expanded with an existing customer, a fast-growing EV manufacturer in Europe, to add SoundHound Chat AI to their digital assistant. Last quarter, we also announced a partnership with Perplexity to bring cutting-edge online LLMs to SoundHound Chat AI. This has allowed us to offer a truly multifaceted, next-generation voice assistant to phones, cars, and IoT devices. Perplexity helps SoundHound Chat AI provide accurate, up-to-date responses to web-based queries that static offline LLMs cannot currently fulfill, expanding the type and complexity of the questions the assistant is able to answer. The move made SoundHound Chat AI the most advanced voice assistant available on the market today, and we are currently in progress conversations with OEMs about having this capability go live. Moving on to pillar two. This quarter, we won the business of three sizable QSRs. This means that in total, we have now won deals with five of the top 15 QSRs based on the number of locations. One of the QSRs we engaged in Q2 was a large, well-known pizza restaurant with thousands of locations throughout the US. This means that SoundHound is now working with two of the biggest pizza chains out there. Each of these QSR brands represents a sizable opportunity to deploy our technology across thousands of locations. It's an exciting time. We are in a very fortunate position, so how we execute the business at this time will be critical to our performance in this space going forward, and we are mindful of this. Our customer service product portfolio is resonating with businesses of all sizes, so we are winning in large enterprises as well as small chains. It's become clear to us that very few companies can offer businesses of all sizes an affordable, fast, and easy-to-implement solution that addresses their growing needs. We own our technology. We 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 proprietary software. Last year, we introduced a product called Employee Assist, which uses our conversational voice AI technology to support employees like a copilot across a variety of tasks via their headset or a tablet. We already have several customers benefiting from this new service. Those include some large QSR brands, and I'm proud to announce two prominent coffee chains have also signed up this quarter. We are finding that many customers are choosing to sign up for Employee Assist in combination with our drive-thru solution, Dynamic Interaction. They work together in tandem to handle and improve the customer experience while supporting their employees. SoundHound Dynamic Interaction delivers what we believe to be the next generation of all voice AI interfaces. It is full duplex, it's multimodal. It does not require constant use of wake-up words and turn-taking, and can be seamlessly multilingual. We believe its impact on voice AI and conversational interfaces will be as meaningful as multi-touch technology on touch interfaces. Our AI solutions save costs for our customers, improve the experience of the users, and also increase revenue by increasing throughput and proactively offering upsells. Our phone ordering solutions are continuing to ramp up with existing customers like Jersey Mike's, and as mentioned earlier, we are penetrating into thousands of pizza chain locations across the US. We announced Beef 'O' Brady's where we are already live in all corporate locations and plan to roll out to 20 states very soon. Going beyond restaurants, SoundHound Smart Answering is showing rapid growth within pillar two. We already have hundreds of locations live from single location small businesses to brands with multiple locations. Last quarter, we talked about Planet Fitness and we have already gone live and continue to roll out more. We are seeing great traction in franchise retail businesses and across a number of industries. These include personal care, professional services, home and local services, automotive services, among others. We are excited about Smart Answering because the number of industries it caters to opens up a massive market for us to address with millions of businesses in the United States alone. The seamless implementation capabilities allow us to scale fast and the use cases for companies of all sizes are obvious. Whether it's handling multiple calls at once 24/7, conveniently filtering out spam calls, providing verbal and SMS responses, taking configurable actions, capturing leads with intelligent messaging and answering questions about policies, hours, products, services, pricing, and more. We have built a competitive moat with our proprietary technology that is creating massive opportunity in customer service. On to pillar three where we are making great progress and accelerated that path this quarter with the acquisition of Allset. The ordering platform we acquired through Allset enables us to build a voice commerce ecosystem. The acquisition will ultimately enable consumers to use cutting-edge voice AI to order foods from their vehicles, phones, and smart devices. Additionally, the Allset team brings a wealth of marketplace experience and knowledge that will make a voice commerce ecosystem a reality. We are creating a new category, and together we plan to provide dynamic and convenient ways for people to order food and complete a range of other transactions just by speaking naturally. And as we increase the notable names that we sign every quarter in pillar one and two, it also helps us get one step closer to mobilizing this strategy. With this strategic move, we have significantly increased our addressable market while creating new, more convenient, and accessible consumer experiences. Our customer engagement with this vision has always been well received, with existing and prospective customers getting even more interested over time as our portfolio of customers using voice-enabled services grows. We always talked about the flywheel effect with this vision, and we are starting to see that take shape. In closing, we have consistently grown at a rate of 50% or more and continue to fortify our financial position, all while gaining market share, attracting new enterprise customers and creating some of the most innovative voice AI technology in the world. We are proud of the best-in-class experiences we are creating for our customers and their customers, but our ambitions to keep aiming higher and push the boundaries continue to grow. As an example of that ambition, today we acquired Amelia. Amelia is an innovative company that shares our passion for AI-fueled conversations. We are looking forward to leveraging our shared capabilities to offer the best AI customer support solutions available anywhere. We are also pleased to welcome the team from Amelia to SoundHound and are excited about what we can do together. We believe the disruption in the market for AI we are seeing today is building towards our exact vision when we created SoundHound almost 20 years ago. A lot of our predictions are now becoming a reality. With another strong quarter, where we beat market expectations for revenue, we couldn't be more pleased with the momentum we are seeing and the demand for our products and solutions. We look forward to continued engagements with our stakeholders as we create value. We are grateful to our amazing team that makes this all possible with their shared vision. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Nitesh to talk about our financial performance, key growth drivers, and outlook for the remainder of the year.

Nitesh Sharan, CFO

Thank you, Keyvan, and good afternoon, everyone. Q2 revenue increased 54% year-over-year. The results are another positive mile marker on our growth journey where we achieved $13.5 million in revenue. This marks our fourth consecutive quarter exceeding $10 million in revenue. We meaningfully improved our balance sheet in the quarter by paying down our debt and completing the conversion of outstanding preferred equity. I mentioned before that our capital position is a source of strength. We want to maintain that strength because it affords us the opportunity to go on the attack when it makes sense for us. We do that through organic investments to fuel disruption, partnerships to help scale aggressively, and acquisitions to accelerate our pace. One of the measures we use to gauge customer traction is backlog. In Q2, our cumulative subscriptions and bookings backlog roughly doubled year-over-year to $723 million, with an average duration of slightly less than seven years. Most of the expansion this quarter was in the restaurant space, although we continue to gain traction with automotive partners. For example, with Stellantis adding five additional brands going into production with SoundHound Chat AI. Today, we announced and Keyvan noted earlier, our acquisition of conversational AI leader Amelia. Let me spend a minute explaining how we think about M&A. First, we believe having a programmatic M&A approach can be value-generating. Our acquisition philosophy stems from our overall strategy and vision, which is to voice-enable the world with conversational intelligence and transform the next wave of how humans will interact with technology, increasingly with voice and natural conversations. We know the requisite underpinning technology to enable this vision is here now. In fact, we've built a lot of it ourselves. And we continue to see customer demand and adoption for these capabilities growing. When we acquired SYNQ3 earlier this year, it was an accelerant for our restaurant business. Last quarter, when we announced the Allset acquisition, it was to catalyze our monetization pillar to connect voice-enabled services and products seamlessly together. Today's acquisition of Amelia is about accelerating more broadly in pillar two, customer service, and significantly expanding our industry reach. The primary filters we have been using to select appropriate acquisition targets have been, one, does it fit within our long-term strategy? Two, will it amplify or accelerate our pathway to realize that strategy? Three, can we effectively operationalize it and drive meaningful synergies? And four, can we buy it at the right price, appreciating the risks that inherently come from such transactions? Amelia checked those boxes for us. While it would be a meaningful acquisition with a lot of complementarity, we don't take the integration effort lightly and know it will take some time to get it right, but the prize together was too attractive to bypass in our opinion, especially with the enterprise traction and demands we have been seeing in the marketplace. We just announced this today, so it's still quite early, and we know there will be questions, so please note that we plan to share more and dive much deeper on the opportunity we see. Stay tuned for more details. With that, let me now focus on and discuss the second quarter financials in more detail. Q2 revenue was $13.5 million, up 54% year-over-year. We continue to see growing automotive unit growth of healthy double digits in addition to unit price expansion, driven by our generative AI solutions and overall product expansion. The quarter benefited from a minimum guarantee edge solution purchased by Stellantis, and also from a year-over-year basis the contribution from SYNQ3. Within restaurants, we continue to scale with customers, sign meaningful new logos, and further diversified product offerings. The quarter had nice balance across our pillars, where our restaurant business comprised roughly 25% of revenue. In Q2, our gross margins were 63%, down year-over-year, largely resulting from the acquisition, including the mix of lower-margin call center agent business. Adjusting for acquisition impact, notably the non-cash amortization of purchased intangibles, gross margins would have been 67%. While the acquired call center business does weigh on our margins in the near-term, there is value in what this business can do for broader opportunities to come and what the data can bring to our models. That said, our goal over time is to automate and modernize. R&D expenses were $15.7 million in Q2, an increase of 34% year-over-year. We are prioritizing investments in disruptive innovation like our Polaris initiative to expand our suite of products to address a wider array of customer needs, and we continue fine-tuning the way we leverage large language models to provide even more value to customers at less cost. For example, we will continue to be thoughtful and opportunistic about which models we work with versus using our own and always keep the customers' needs top of mind. Ultimately, our ability to arbitrate between models is a differentiator that we will continue to expand upon. Sales and marketing expenses were $5.7 million in Q2, an increase of 11% year-over-year. We continue to thoughtfully invest in go-to-market and customer engagement to capture the strong momentum and heightened demand. We are expanding reach through brand and industry marketing, demand generation, and high ROI lead generation strategies. G&A expenses were $9.5 million in Q2, an increase of 48% year-over-year. The increase in G&A reflects two main elements that we talked about the past few quarters; our year-over-year comparison continues to be impacted by investments in financial and non-financial processes and internal controls to support requirements under SOX 404(b), as we became a large, accelerated filer last year. Our G&A was also negatively impacted by acquisition-related costs in the quarter. All operating expense line items were impacted by the SYNQ3 acquisition. Non-cash employee stock compensation was $7.3 million in Q2. As a result, our operating loss for Q2 was $22 million. This includes non-cash acquisition impacts related to the fair value accounting that will likely introduce volatility into this line for the foreseeable future. OI&E was $14.7 million of net expense for the quarter. Compared to previous quarters, the increase in OI&E was mainly due to the one-time early repayment of our debt and associated extinguishment costs. We announced earlier in the quarter that we were able to repay the existing debt on favorable prepayment terms, allowing us to avoid sizable interest payments over the coming years. The net loss was $37.3 million in the quarter. This led to a GAAP net loss per share in Q2 of $0.11. Adjusting for non-cash acquisition-related amortization of purchased intangibles, fair value adjustments, M&A transaction costs, stock-based compensation, and other non-cash items such as the gain on bargain purchase, our non-GAAP EPS loss was $0.04 in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $13.8 million in Q2, improving sequentially by 10%. The year-over-year increase was driven primarily by acquisition impacts and growth investments we have been making in the business. Our cash position at quarter-end was $201 million with no outstanding debt. We see a market that is moving fast and believe having a strong financial profile in times like these is crucial to success. We are in a position of strength and focused on creating long-term sustainable growth and profitability. With that, let me discuss our outlook for the remainder of 2024 and our prospects for 2025. We have made great progress. The core business is growing, our technology is permeating across and resonating with an increasing roster of amazing customers. We expect the acquisition of Amelia to improve our financial profile. There are top-line synergies, and we also expect to be able to extract a lot of value from the combined companies. It's a little early in the process to be too precise, so let me build up how we see the rest of this year and entry into next year. We are cognizant that a significant acquisition like this will require heavy integration that will take time to fully align across the enterprise. We are baking this into our go-forward assumptions. As we noted in our press release this morning, we expect this acquisition to be accretive to earnings in the second half of 2025, and we now see 2024 revenue to exceed $80 million and 2025 revenue to exceed $150 million. There's much more potential here, but at this stage, it's appropriate for us to stay measured and calibrated on setting expectations. Amelia brings a diverse business with strong recurring revenue and also some other businesses that we are calibrating on to identify how best to fit them into our portfolio. In full transparency, there are lower growth and margin businesses where we want to assess the life cycle value of each contract to determine the best go-forward approach. These decisions may affect the pace of our growth or our trajectory on margins, so we need some time to finalize the plan. Ultimately though, we see a combined growth profile that is even more attractive than we were standalone with greater profitability, and we see tremendous value to share with customers, employees, and partners over the coming years. In conclusion, we are happy with where we are. We are aggressively moving forward. And while we know the path forward won't be linear, we have a clear vision that we are accelerating towards.

Operator, Operator

We will now move to Q&A.

Gil Luria, Analyst

Hi, good afternoon. One for Keyvan, one for Nitesh, both on the acquisition. This is a transformative acquisition. So, one, Keyvan, up until now, a lot of the strategy has been around autos and restaurants, pillars one, two, and three. There's a very good alignment in the strategy between those end markets and that pillar framework. How do you see that changing now that you're bringing Amelia into the fold in terms of what verticals you're going to have and what your focus is going to be in terms of pillars?

Keyvan Mohajer, CEO

Thanks for the question. Transformative is the right word, and I appreciate you bringing that up. The strategy is becoming even stronger. The acquisition of Amelia provides us with significantly more scale in the second pillar. We have always planned to expand beyond restaurants. For us, restaurants are akin to what books were for Amazon; they started with books and now offer a wide range of products. We’ve aimed to apply our AI customer service technology to various industries. While we possess outstanding technology to deliver to these brands, it requires time to penetrate their customer base, understand their needs, and integrate into their systems, particularly with larger enterprise clients. Amelia has built up 26 years of customer relationships and integrations. They also have excellent complementary products and technologies, which accelerates our vision. This acquisition greatly enhances our scale in the second pillar, and many of their customers align well with our third pillar. Their clientele spans retail, ticketing, insurance, financial services, and hospitality, all of which fit nicely into our vision for the third pillar.

Nitesh Sharan, CFO

Thanks, Gil. I want to state upfront that more details will be available soon since we just made this announcement today. There will be filings and a lot to discuss, but let me outline the high-level structure and our vision for moving forward in both the near and long term. We are particularly excited about Amelia as a software business that has gained strong customer traction and established deep, robust relationships over time. This creates opportunities for us to expand services, products, and margins through upselling and cross-selling. Amelia has multiple components to their business, and we plan to integrate them with our existing profile. As I mentioned before this acquisition, we anticipate a strong long-term growth profile with healthy software margins exceeding 70% gross margins. At scale, we expect EBIT margins of over 30%, and I see that remaining unchanged with this acquisition. It’s important to think of us in phases; we are transitioning toward breakeven after a cash utilization phase. Looking to next year and beyond, we aim to invest in significant growth opportunities, viewing this as a generational shift in how people interact with technology—especially through natural conversations and voice. Therefore, we will be in the breakeven zone for a while, directing additional funds into these growth prospects. Regarding EBIT margin and the potential for earnings growth in the second half, we do have a capital-light profile that translates smoothly into cash flow. To summarize, we will be integrating the combination, identifying synergy and cost opportunities as we assess both companies. As we move into next year, we expect earnings accretion and benefits in cash flow. By the end of 2025 and into 2026, we anticipate being a much larger, still rapidly growing company boasting healthy gross and EBIT margins, not yet at our full potential because we will be investing those extra funds into our growth opportunities. However, shortly after that, you can expect us to operate as a business with EBIT margins exceeding 30%.

Dan Ives, Analyst

And great quarter. Can you just talk about how conversations with prospective customers have changed, let's say, over the last three, six months compared to even a year ago? Can you just maybe anecdotally talk about that, just given where everything is going from a technology perspective, new verticals? And I think the view of SoundHound, right, is obviously changing dramatically in the market. Thanks.

Keyvan Mohajer, CEO

In pillar one, we are witnessing a significant shift where automotive and device companies are now willing to invest more in generative AI. Historically, we’ve faced pressure to reduce costs for the past 20 years. However, for the first time, when we present the option to upgrade to the SoundHound Chat AI, which includes generative AI, these companies are ready to pay the additional royalty. This represents a notable change. Moving to pillar two, we are experiencing a transformation in AI customer service. Brands are approaching us now instead of the other way around. Previously, securing a meeting to share our value proposition was a success, but now we need to adapt to handle the high volume of incoming requests. Companies are eager to accelerate their progress, aiming to transition from pilot projects to full-scale production, and they want to ensure that we can grow with them. This presents a far more advantageous challenge for us compared to simply trying to arrange meetings.

Nitesh Sharan, CFO

We believe it's an excellent time to pursue a deal. Our technology is successfully integrating into various ecosystems. Over the years, we have developed our core proprietary technology, which is now gaining traction as we expand from the automotive sector into restaurants. The addition of Amelia brings several benefits, as we've outlined in our press release, with even more potential benefits to explore. It diversifies our industry reach and enhances our skills and integration capabilities. They have a strong network of channel partners that we can utilize in other parts of our business. There is a significant opportunity for product synergy; for instance, our Smart Answering and Employee Assist products can align well with their offerings. When considering inorganic versus organic opportunities, we are paying attention to market momentum and customer needs. Customers are eager for solutions that leverage technology to enhance their growth. This isn't just about improving productivity; it's also about generating new revenue, particularly in the restaurant sector. While it's important to relieve overworked staff, we've observed consistent increases in upselling and automation, which contributes significantly to a customer's revenue. We're aware of the integration challenges associated with meaningful initiatives, but from a long-term perspective, this is a time to be proactive. We're hearing directly from customers about their needs, and we are very enthusiastic about the partnership with Amelia.

Mike Latimore, Analyst

Great, thanks. Yeah, congrats on all the developments here. Looks great. The query volume growth was 90% and last quarter it was 60% year-over-year. What caused that acceleration?

Keyvan Mohajer, CEO

Yeah, a lot of it is automotive partners that upgraded to SoundHound Chat AI. We did mention that when you upgrade to Chat AI, because of the generative AI feature, the usage went up. So, consumers are actually interacting with the assistant a lot more. In some pilots, it was an order of magnitude. So that's one. And also just scaling in pillar two, having more customer service customers.

Scott Buck, Analyst

Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. First, I'm just curious, with the closing of Amelia, do you now have all the tools in the toolbox necessary to complete the three-pillar strategy and do it successfully?

Keyvan Mohajer, CEO

Well, we've had the tools, we just needed the scale, and we reached a point where we thought we had that scale earlier this year. We are now in millions of cars and double-digit thousand locations in pillar two. So just connecting them together seemed like at the right time. We also have national coverage of certain brands, like Chipotle, for example, and the acquisition of Allset earlier is going to accelerate the integration. Now we just need to do the integration of bringing those pillar two customers into pillar one products. And with Amelia, we just massively increased our scale in pillar two. So, going from double-digit thousand locations, mostly in restaurants, now we are in almost 200 large enterprise brands in new verticals for us. So, we are in retail now, we are in hospitality, we are in financial services, insurance, and healthcare.

Leo Carpio, Analyst

Good afternoon, gentlemen. First, congratulations on the deal and on the quarter. Just want to dive a little bit further into Amelia. In terms of the deal, can you just talk us through in terms of who approached who for this transaction? How did you become aware of Amelia? And then, looking forward, post-Amelia, what other verticals you may be interested in?

Nitesh Sharan, CFO

Sure. I'll begin with the framework I outlined in the prepared remarks. Firstly, we believe that being open to the possibility of programmatic mergers and acquisitions and understanding who the key players are, both from a partnership and competitive standpoint, is integral to our identity. We're consistently aware of the market dynamics. We have been familiar with Amelia and their notable achievements for quite some time. In the AI sector, particularly over the past 18 to 20 months, there have been numerous ideas presented by bankers. We've engaged in discussions about partnerships and have concentrated on our target sectors. As Keyvan mentioned, it’s essential to start with our overarching vision. We aim to voice-enable the world through conversational intelligence, and we believe an omnichannel migration is underway that will affect all industries. Our focus has not just been limited to specific sectors like restaurants or automobiles but has always been about evolving beyond our foundational industries. The question then becomes when, how, and with whom we should expand, whether organically or otherwise. We've initiated contact, explored opportunities, and built relationships, which led us to consider a potential combination. Delving into the complexities of such deals takes time; it's a lengthy process of due diligence and understanding each other's cultures to assess fit. We've been engaged in this process for several months and have arrived at our current position.

Operator, Operator

There are no further questions at this time. So, this now concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.