Q1 2023 SoundHound Inc Earnings Call
Speaker 2: and welcome to the SoundHound Q1 2023 Earnings Conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised.
Speaker 2: So, withdraw your question. Press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Scott Smith, head of investor relations. Please go ahead. Thank you.
Speaker 3: Great, thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining our first quarter 2023 conference call. With me today is our CEO , Kayvon Mahajer, and our CFO , Natesh Sharan. We'll begin with some short remarks before moving to Q&A.
Speaker 3: We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll be making forward-looking statements on this call.
Speaker 3: looking state. Please refer to our filings with the SEC for a detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could affect our business.
Speaker 3: In addition, we may discuss certain non-GAAP measures.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 3: An audio replay will be available shortly following today's call.
Speaker 3: With that, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO , Kavon Mahajer. Please go ahead, Kavon. Thank you.
Speaker 4: Thank you Scott and thank you to everyone for joining the call today.
Speaker 4: The startup food is on 23 with a pivotal time for sandhound and our path to sustainable and profitable growth.
Speaker 4: During the quarter, we raised a significant amount of capital, streamlined our organization, reduced our expenses, and with the launch of SoundHound Chat AI, we unveiled our innovative approach of integrating generative AI and large language models into our full stack of technology.
Speaker 4: technology for conversational voice AI.
Speaker 4: And while the first quarter was a transition quarter for us, we overachieved our target and grew our revenue by 56% year over year.
Speaker 4: In our Pillar 1 of revenue, where we power devices such as cars, TVs and IOTs, we have added several new brands, including a transformational Turkish automotive manufacturer of electrical vehicles.
Speaker 4: We have also expanded our global reach by adding two brands associated with the Stellantis group and now have 10 brands with them in total.
Speaker 4: Additionally, we found a new revolutionary television manufacturer which is expected to launch later this year.
Speaker 4: We also close a new deal with a multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of printers.
Speaker 4: In Q1, the number of cars shipping with Sanhass Technology more than doubled year over year, and we expect the growth to accelerate as more brands sign up and existing customers expand.
Speaker 4: In our Pillar 2 of revenue, where we power customer service applications, we have signed up hundreds of new brands.
Speaker 4: It's important to note that our AI customer service solutions are fully autonomous, which is different from the human-assisted AI solution that other vendors are offering in this particular field.
Speaker 4: This key differentiator, in addition to giving us much better margins, also enables us to get things right together so when we want to do it again in real time.
Speaker 4: to abstract brands of all sizes from a single location to thousands of locations.
Speaker 4: Our newly launched TimeHandChat AR classroom is already positively impacting both Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 revenues.
Speaker 4: In Pillar 1, we are seeing demand from existing customers and new brands.
Speaker 4: We expect faster adoption, better user experience, more frequent usage, and ultimately more revenue per device from our Pillar 1 customers. In Pillar 2, we are expanding our AI customer service solutions from restaurants to other businesses.
Speaker 4: We have always envisioned that restaurants are to soundhounds what books were to Amazon. They started by selling books, then over time expanded to other categories, eventually everything from A to Z. Now, thanks to Soundhound Chat AI, we are able to accelerate our vision and expand from restaurants to nearly all business types within this year.
Speaker 4: We expect this to increase our near-term out-of-the-market by more than 10 times.
Speaker 4: We are doing this by expanding our smart ordering solution for restaurants with a new service called Smart Answering.
Speaker 4: While smart ordering currently allows a restaurant to automatically upload its menu and enable customers to place orders with their voice assistant over the phone, we have simple integration with one of our POS partners.
Speaker 4: Smart Answering will allow any business to field nearly any inbound queries or questions for opening hours, parking, location, typical wait times, products and services, appointments and reservations, and more, using an automated assistant over the phone.
Speaker 4: By automatically incorporating data from the business website, we can significantly accelerate the onboarding, allow the customers to test within minutes, and be live on the same day.
Speaker 4: We are augmenting smart answering with generative AI capabilities so that any voice assistant built on our platform can respond to more open-ended questions with answers that are tailored to a specific business.
Speaker 4: using our proprietary TimeHoundChat AI platform.
Speaker 4: AI hallucination is one of the major weaknesses of generative AI models when these models produce incorrect, misleading, and at times harmful responses that are deceptively convincing. On a large benchmark of real usage data, we have reduced the undesired AI hallucinations by over 90% to a negligible amount.
Speaker 4: Smart answering helps businesses ranging from hair salons to auto shops manage inbound inquiries in a much more tailored and accurate manner.
Speaker 4: Onboarding for smart answering and smart ordering has been streamlined such that we expect adoption to accelerate. We are helping businesses create efficiencies when many are tackling rising costs, staffing shortages, supply chain issues and other headwinds.
Speaker 4: No longer will a customer service professional need to break away from serving their clients to answer the phone, book appointments, or address basic questions.
Speaker 4: of the burden of answering calls so that they can focus on more business critical tasks.
Speaker 4: The service also helps businesses cater to the evolving expectation of consumers who increasingly prefer customer service to be automated across channels. We believe Sanhan Smart Answering is the first of its kind in the industry. Until now, only businesses with large capital resources could afford AI-enabled customer service.
Speaker 4: And even though the quality of such solutions have been historically worse than humans,
Speaker 4: They still took large upfront investments and long development cycles. Our Stand-On Smart Answering Solution can be live within minutes with high quality and is for any business, large or small, with affordable pricing.
Speaker 4: Now onto our strategic partnerships. One of the key to success in winning deals with a large number of businesses is the ability to integrate with a variety of point of sale systems.
Speaker 4: Now on to our strategic partnerships. One of the key to success in winning deals with a large number of businesses is the ability to integrate with a variety of point-of-sale systems that act as the brain center of the businesses.
Speaker 4: Along with our original point of sale integration with Square, this quarter we went live with our Toast restaurant point of sale integration and we've been working closely with our sales organization on our joint go-to-market. In addition, our voice AI is now available on Oracle Metro Symphony POS.
Speaker 4: that continuously helps any restaurant accept voice orders over the phone, via menu kiosks, or at the drive-thrus on the platform.
Speaker 4: Oracle has been a great partner and we sincerely value their collaboration.
Speaker 4: We are also now live with Ola, the leading open SaaS platform for restaurants and are already working with several well-known brands in their customer base.
Speaker 4: These strategic channel partnerships expand our reach to hundreds of thousands of new locations.
Speaker 4: Other strategy partnerships include our collaborations with Qualcomm, Harman, and LG.
Speaker 4: On technology innovation, which is the core part of the RDNA, we continue to push the boundaries with townhouse chat AI and dynamic interaction.
Speaker 4: While SoundHand Chat AI is our innovative integration of generative AI and large language models with our software engineering modules that solve for AI hallucinations and deliver real-time content from our knowledge domains,
Speaker 4: Dynamic Interaction is a spur-of-its-kind multi-modal full-duplex interface with real-time, continuous audio, visual and touch feedback loops with no wave-force, awkward pauses or turn-taking.
Speaker 4: It ignores off-topic speech, makes proactive suggestions to the user, and intelligently decides when to use audio or visual output. Dynamic interaction is a category defining breakthrough for human-computer interaction and still unmatched by any other technology out there today.
Speaker 4: We initially launched dynamic interaction in a drive-through ordering experience. Then, early this year, we combined dynamic interaction with our existing Generative AI technology that we've been working on since 2019.
Speaker 4: And as we did last year with dynamic interaction for restaurants, we brought ourselves one step closer to our ultimate vision of making computers better than humans in language understanding and more human in the way they interact and respond.
Speaker 4: There is a lot of enthusiasm around AI, and it's important to distinguish the companies that have the technology to back it up.
Speaker 4: Tam Ham is one of those companies.
Speaker 4: My co-founders and I nearly two decades ago at Stanford University Donbroom predicted that within our lifetime, computers would become better than humans in language understanding. And we created soundhounds to pursue that vision and make the world a better place.
Speaker 4: Over the years of constant innovation, we have seen and benefited from real disruptions such as the mobile ecosystem transformation.
Speaker 4: We have also been able to avoid distractions from short-lasting hype such as the messenger bots and smart speaker skills that did not result in mass adoption.
Speaker 4: But now, we absolutely believe the impact of generative AI and large language models is indeed a disruption.
Speaker 4: We expect its impact to be larger than the mobile ecosystem transformation.
Speaker 4: We believe nearly every business can be transformed, new user experiences will be unveiled rapidly, and users are ready and eager to adapt these new experiences.
Speaker 4: You are clearly at the intersection of demand and technology readiness for conversational AI and we view the market impact of the resulting momentum in our field to be transformative.
Speaker 4: The real opportunity is for nimble companies with the right experience and also the tenacity to move fast.
Speaker 4: It's for companies that have the experience and foundation to understand and utilize the strength of the new AI models while being aware of the weaknesses and solving them using their experience and their own core technologies.
Speaker 4: SoundHound is one of those companies. The spark of new wave of innovation has occurred and there is a lot more to come.
Speaker 4: We are enabling more tasks to be automated, whether driving in a car using a smart device or through customer service.
Speaker 4: We see AI not just becoming more efficient and more effective than humans, but also more consistent and reliable, to the extent that consumers will ultimately prefer to interact with an agent powered by conversational AI when transactions with a business.
Speaker 4: The predictability of the AI technology can ultimately eliminate many of the variables that lead to an anti-satisfactory user and customer experience.
Speaker 4: We believe our products are creating more opportunities for interaction and consequently the increased usage translates to more relevancy for product creators and service-oriented businesses looking to drive further adoption for their customers and ultimately more demand for soundness products and services.
Speaker 4: SoundHound is in a unique position to take advantage of this rare moment, thanks to our advanced and comprehensive technologies, mature products, and existing customer base. In our view, SoundHound's conversational AI is a great tool for the development of Spark, is an applied tool to improve our development and narrowating the inputs of all physicians
Speaker 4: In our view, conversational AI can't be done as a side project. It can't be achieved by simply integrating a few external APIs.
Speaker 4: Creating the necessary technologies to win in conversational AI takes time. By owning all the core pieces of the engine that we have built from the ground up over the many years, we have a distinct competitive advantage.
Speaker 4: us from the beginning and the many new ones that continue to show interest in our vision, our technology and what it can do to create tremendous value for businesses and consumers alike. We thank you for your continued support and look forward to further engagement.
Speaker 4: I also wanted to take the time to acknowledge all our employees. I am proud to collaborate with such an amazing team and want to thank them for their tireless efforts to get us to where we are today and paving the path to where we will be tomorrow.
Speaker 4: We are innovating faster than ever and are in a position of strength to not only maintain our leadership in core voice-enabled AI technology, but further gain traction as enterprises are increasingly realizing that they have a time-sensitive need for sound-house technologies. We are confident we have the right strategy and see that our technology is resonating every day. We remain agile and focused and are right where we need to be to reach our goals for 2023.
Speaker 3: of year top line growth while demonstrating steady progress in driving efficiencies and improving cash flow.
Speaker 3: Large language models, generative AI, and the pervasiveness of chatbots are unearthing entirely new use cases every day. The opportunity set and adoption curves will accelerate rapidly, and we are at the forefront of this next major inflection in technology.
Speaker 3: the bulk of our current business and backlog is in pillar one.
Speaker 3: And in Q1, our cumulative bookings backlog was 336 million, of 46% year-over-year. That level expanded with more than 10 million of new gross bookings in the quarter, with deals across auto, devices, and other IoT manufacturers.
Speaker 3: In this pillar, we continue to extend our offering across new units, while adding more features to existing ones to expand revenue per unit.
Speaker 3: We can scale with existing customers and we are constantly adding new ones. In automotive, for example, we saw over 2x growth in units and also realized unit price expansion in Q1. And there are some really exciting new brands in our pipeline.
Speaker 3: Growing our pillar to Voice Enabled Services is a key focus area starting with AI-enabled customer services for restaurants.
Speaker 3: The demand is real and one advantage here is the pace at which we can scale because of the much shorter sales cycle and activation timeline.
Speaker 3: Generally with less than 50 locations per brand.
Speaker 3: Since January , we rapidly extended that progress into mid-market and enterprise, who typically have more than 100 locations each. Although these enterprise deals take slightly longer to close, once we onboard one location, it can be nearly immediate for us to scale across the full fleet.
Speaker 3: And as Kayvon noted, we are also scaling and expanding into more enterprise-focused point-of-sale systems.
Speaker 3: Already live with Square and Toast, these systems, like Olo and Oracle Microsymphony, extend our offering into hundreds of thousands of new locations.
Speaker 3: We mentioned expansion into other areas of customer service with new solutions for smart answering and smart ordering that are vertical agnostic and can be deployed by any business that is looking to gain an edge on their competition and significantly improve their customer experience.
Speaker 3: To quantify that further, we are basically expanding the immediate addressable opportunity from roughly 1 million restaurants to tens of millions of customer service opportunities in the US alone.
Speaker 3: We expect monthly recurring revenue in the several hundred dollars per location, if not more, so you can see how the math can quickly compound and why this is expected to become a very meaningful revenue driver.
Speaker 3: Let us now get specific on our financial results for the first quarter.
Speaker 3: In Q1, we generated $6.7 million in revenue, up 56% year-over-year, driven by strong growth in our product royalties in strength and automotive.
Speaker 3: Our product loyalty revenue increased primarily due to strong customer momentum and expansion with key global brands. Our long-term commitments demonstrate the continued strong partnerships we've developed and the continued share gains we're experiencing. In Q1, our growth margin improved to 71%.
Speaker 3: up from 59% in the prior year quarter, which was largely driven by the expanding scale of our business, migration of cloud services, and increased data center efficiency.
Speaker 3: Cost of revenue for the quarter was $2 million, up 11% from the prior year Q1.
Speaker 3: The majority of our cost of revenue includes data center costs supporting our customer production environments. We also continue to migrate some on-premise activities to the cloud, helping us drive further gross margin expansion as we scale the business.
Speaker 3: Operating expenses saw a step function reduction in Q1 compared to the previous quarter as we executed our announced corporate restructuring program.
Speaker 3: Restructuring expenses in Q1 were $3.6 million.
Speaker 3: The full benefit of our cost reductions are expected to be realized as we move into Q2 and beyond, while expected restructuring expenses should be minimal in future quarters.
Speaker 3: R&D expenses were $14.2 million in Q1, a decrease of 15% year-over-year and 34% sequentially, largely due to the restructuring action.
Speaker 3: We delivered this by successfully completing our ambitious language development plans while bringing to market key innovation in both dynamic interaction and SoundHound Chat AI in Q1.
Speaker 3: Notably, our investment in key areas has not slowed as we continue to build out our Voice AI platform and leverage our deep patent portfolio.
Speaker 3: We intend to remain at the forefront of innovation in the rapidly evolving ecosystems of artificial intelligence and machine learning, while also helping to develop and scale our cloud offering and other products and services. In silver marketing, we also saw sequential expense reduction, although year over year we saw an increase from prior.
Speaker 3: up 89% year over year, and down 28% sequentially.
Speaker 3: With our organizational shifts in 2023, we expect this expense item to benefit from greater focus. G&A expenses were $7.1 million in Q1, down sequentially, though up 78% year-over-year. In the prior year Q1, we were not yet a public company, and this year-over-year increase in revenue increased by $7.1 million.
Speaker 3: associated with restructuring.
Speaker 3: Our operating loss was $25 million, an improvement of approximately $3.7 million from the prior quarter.
Speaker 3: Net loss was $26.4 million in Q1 and improvement of approximately $4.3 million from the prior quarter.
Speaker 3: This led to a net loss per share in Q1 of 13 cents and improvement of 2 cents from the prior quarter. Without the one-time impact of restructuring Q1, all these metrics would have been improved even more.
Speaker 3: Adjustity Bata, which excludes non-cash charges of stock compensation and depreciation and amortization as well as other non-operating activities, including restructuring, was a loss of $14.8 million, which was 21 percent better than the loss of $18.6 million last quarter and an improvement of 13 percent year over year.
Speaker 3: Operating cash flow in Q1 was $14.5 million use of cash, improving roughly 30% sequentially.
Speaker 3: and also improved versus the prior year Q1. Now on to the capital structure where we've made great progress in strengthening our balance sheet.
Speaker 3: Our cash position at quarter end was $46.3 million. In January , we successfully raised $25 million in preferred equity.
Speaker 3: Our previously announced committed equity line of credit also became effective, giving us additional access to capital, upon which we raised approximately $29 million in Q1.
Speaker 3: In addition, after quarter-end, we raised $100 million of debt financing, which we partially used to pay off our existing debt of approximately $30 million and eliminate the associated principal amortization payments. All in, our balance sheet has strengthened meaningfully, and we have a fully funded business plan to drive growth and differentiation.
Speaker 3: and provide cushion regardless of how the macroeconomic landscape evolves from here.
Speaker 3: Our capital position is now a source of strength that we will leverage to drive our business aggressively forward while staying streamlined and delivering on our profitability targets.
Speaker 3: With that, I'll move to guidance.
Speaker 3: This year we took actions to set the stage for sustained long-term profitable growth.
Speaker 3: We are pleased with the momentum we have seen start the year and are encouraged with the momentum we continue to see from customers.
Speaker 3: Accordingly, we reaffirm our 2023 guidance and continue to expect that revenue will be in the range of $43 million to $50 million. As we noted last quarter, we expect this revenue will build through the year due to seasonality of Pillar 1 and the scaling of Pillar 2 with restaurants and customer services more broadly.
Speaker 3: We also continue to expect to become adjusted EBITDA positive in Q4 of this year. Before moving to Q&A, I would also like to comment on expectations for other income and expenses in Q2 and impacts from the recent debt refinancing.
Speaker 3: Given the various transaction-related fees and other charges, we expect roughly $6 million to $6.5 million of expense in the quarter associated with one-time transaction fees, expected ongoing amortization impacts, and quarterly interest costs.
Speaker 3: This is different from the historical level, so I wanted to highlight this expectation. To summarize...
Speaker 3: We have taken the important steps to set us up for long-term success.
Speaker 3: We are driving significant market differentiation, delivering on customer demand, and catalyzing disruptive innovation with a high velocity.
Speaker 3: Each quarter on our journey brings its own unique dynamics, yet we are steadily stitching together the foundations for sustainable long-term growth and profitability.
Speaker 2: Thank you. We will now move to Q&A. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again.
Speaker 2: One moment while we compile the Q&A roster.
Speaker 2: Our first question will come from the line of Mike Lattimore with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open. Great, thanks. Yeah, congrats on all the progress this quarter. And just a heads up.
Speaker 5: I guess just two basic technology questions. Can you elaborate a little bit more on why SoundHound can prevent these generative AI hallucinations? Just a little bit more detail on why you're differentiated in that regard.
Speaker 4: Yes, so we... there are actually multiple problems that we are able to fix with our chat.ai platform. One is hallucination. We're... Is there anything else I want to echo on the ends of the slide here? Did I miss something?
Speaker 4: generative AI language models produce incorrect results, but they sound amazing.
Speaker 4: generative AI language models produce incorrect results, but they sound amazing. So it's very...
Speaker 4: makes them more dangerous. The other problem they have is they are stale. They don't have access to real-time information and some of the answers that provide used to be correct but are no longer correct.
Speaker 4: And the way we solve this is we have, we even have this yin-yang diagram that we have two models. One is called Kailan, one is called Kainath. Kailan is conversation AI language. Kainath is conversation on networks.
Speaker 4: The first one is the software engineering approach. The second one is machine learning approach. And the way we combine them, we are able to get the best of both.
Speaker 4: We get this strength of machine learning model that can scale really well. We also get the...
Speaker 4: benefit of soft ranging approach.
Speaker 4: that doesn't suffer from these unpredictable and undesired consequences.
Speaker 4: magic that goes into how we integrate things, but the result is we can reduce the hallucination. We can detect when machine learning is providing an answer that's not correct.
Speaker 4: We also can detect when we need to go to external APIs or get real-time information from other sources. And also we have domains that don't...
Speaker 4: do well with generative AI models, things like navigation to addresses.
Speaker 4: and business search that you need these large data structures. So by combining the two, we really get the best of both.
Speaker 4: huge value that Chat.ai has created. And we have an app that is live that people can test.
Speaker 4: There's a lot more behind the app. It's a platform that we're offering to our Pillar 1 customers, the car makers, IoT makers, and we are using the same techniques with our customer service applications.
Speaker 5: with regard to the cost controlskaEl Your
Speaker 5: Where should we model kind of hot-bex by the name? You know, once you thought of the model, like what would be that absolutely amount of hot-bex you would have in a quarter?
Speaker 3: Well, I guess I will go back a little bit to what I said last time. I had indicated that on an annualized basis we expected through the corporate restructuring actions that we would see about a $60 million reduction in OPEX. So, if you take last year, I think it was close to $136 million.
Speaker 3: They kind of chop off $60 million from that. And then this quarter was a little bit of we executed the action, so there was a sort of partial quarter impact. So I think in Q2, you'll see largely there's still some international and some other pieces, but by and large, we're through it. And so you'll probably see kind of the full extent of it in Q2 and onwards. And thenching to s g n s h l y n E d f pilot
Speaker 3: Um, you know, I don't know part of your question was where will you feel like it is really spread across the line items. So we had impacts across R and D sales and marketing G and a. Um, and it was relatively balanced across all of them. Uh, so does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Great.
Speaker 5: And I guess this last one on the smart ordering and smart answering.
Speaker 5: You know, you've talked about obviously the restaurant vertical. A couple of the incremental verticals you mentioned were kind of more retail, you know, like auto shops, I think. Like, how broadly is that applicable in customer service? Like, can you get into, I don't know, insurance and healthcare as well, which may be a little bit more complicated, or is it more kind of that retail focus? Yeah, good question. It's meant to be very broad.
Speaker 4: and multiple locations you can...
Speaker 4: discover the service and sign up on your own and be live on the same day. And we do utilize your website if you have one. If you don't have one, that's okay, but if you have a website you're able to pre-populate a lot of the information from your website and all you have to do is just
Speaker 4: examine the information we've extracted and validate it. It really could be live, you know, you could go live on the same day as you discover the feature. Okay, great. That makes sense. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Brett Noblach.
Speaker 6: With cancer Fitzgerald, your line is open. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess the first is on the bookings backlog. It kind of increased by the slowest amount or a much slower pace than it has over the most recent quarters. Is this kind of like what you expected going into the quarter? How should you think about it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll start Brett. So I think, you know.
Speaker 3: I'll start with yes, you know, we know that Q1 tends to so seasonally it tends to be a little softer Just generally for the business part of that is still in the heavy kind of rhythm of
Speaker 3: the influence of the auto business in our overall business. And so the deals tend to be lumpy and we had some acceleration of stuff prior year. We know things will happen that some things are still in motion that haven't necessarily closed at the end of Q1. So, it was by and large in the zone of what we expected.
Speaker 3: To your highlight, one other thing that we've been highlighting now, I certainly talked about last quarter is our business shifts and we emphasize the pillar two opportunity, particularly take restaurants as an example. We aren't necessarily reflecting those in bookings.
Speaker 3: And so, you know, we, as we talked about as we scale that, and we move into pillar to pillar three, you'll be hearing more about other type recurring type metrics. They are and so forth. So there's a little bit of composition of the deals. We're focused on. There's a little bit of just normal seasonality and these things can be lumpy. So quite honestly, there's probably a metric better considered on an annualized basis versus even quarterly check ins. But.
Speaker 3: But I obviously want to give a milestone as to how things are moving. So I'd say overall, kind of in line. And I'd say quarter, when I look at it, when I look at the top line perspective, when I look at where we are in movement towards profitability goals that we put out there, I generally would characterize this as an in line quarter across most of the metrics. Obviously, you can't dial it to the T on anything.
Speaker 3: But that's how I kind of characterize the whole quarter in general.
Speaker 6: Perfect. And I guess on the full year outlook, right, it implies quite significant acceleration over the last three quarters. Can you maybe help us out from a modeling perspective and give us some weights that we should expect in terms of when we should expect revenue to fall throughout the remainder of the year?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll go back to something we said last quarter at least. With revenue, we said similar to 2022 that we expected about a third of the revenue in the first half, two-thirds in the second half. So, I'd say we're kind of marching on that path. In terms of the pathway on profitability, similar to what I answered Mike's question.
Speaker 3: We were going through the.
Speaker 3: Adjustments on our cost structure in Q1, those have largely been completed. So now entering Q2, by and large, we're sort of at the right level from an operating standpoint. We expect to be able to scale meaningfully with this sort of cost footprint. So, as you get into the ramping of revenue, and we also said, like, we expect revenue to build every corner.
Speaker 6: landscape, right? I think the news kind of this week was Wendy's is using a Google AI to power their drive-through ordering system. Obviously, this is a space that you guys have been trying to break into and have been quite positive on the last several quarters. So I guess, you know, how are you competing with Google on this front?
Speaker 4: Do you see them when competing for new deals? Do you expect to see them? Should we do this as a URS Google type of market? Does any comment there? Thank you. Mostly it's validation of the space because in the last couple of weeks we've seen a whole bunch of announcements. Thank you.
Speaker 4: and our visibility is that these were POCs that
Speaker 7: you know, the
Speaker 4: The restaurant customers have benefited in announcing it to show they are innovating in the space that is very important.
Speaker 4: benefit in announcing it to show they are innovating in the space that is very important.
Speaker 4: So net positive and very much validating. In terms of our view is that some of the big tech players, they have cloud deals and they to win the cloud is they bundle voice AI and.
Speaker 4: It's not really the core part of their offering, but they do lead to some POCs in terms of the precedence, but they're making raises large.
Speaker 4: technology competitiveness, the dynamic interaction that we really highlight in our drive-thru.
Speaker 4: is very much unmatched. Like when we present it to our customers, nothing comes close to it. So it's just a matter of education and...
Speaker 4: presenting it to putting in front of the brands and it's rapidly becoming from something that is novel and you have to convince customers that they should pay attention to it to something that
Speaker 4: they are realizing they need it and it's time sensitive. So it's very much a validation and positive update in the last few weeks.
Speaker 3: Maybe I'll just build on that. There's a couple points. One is you always got to respect competition, then you got to fight aggressively against it. I do think we should highlight more broadly, and we've talked a little bit about this, just to double click on Kayvon's comments in his prepared remark and even response to earlier questions. We have been in this for a while. We have the core technology. We have deep end patent portfolios.
Speaker 3: generative AI brings a lot to the table here, and we can uniquely sort of bring the best of all the worlds to improve the technology. And a real key differentiator when you look more broadly at the players that are trying to enter the space in the particularly quick service restaurant, it's sort of supplemented with humans in the background. So people will claim a.
Speaker 3: Order completion rate is a success metric in the high percentages, you know, eighty five plus percent. And the reality is, when you look underneath it, they have very low gross margins. It could tell you that they have a lot of humans operating in the background. And it's not apples to apples versus ours is fully automated. And we can get that level exceeding human performance with some of the restaurants we've been working with for for a long time now.
Speaker 3: really fully automated and that is good for the restaurant, good for the customer, good for our margin profile. And so there's real differences out there. I think it's cave on started with it's very validating of the massive opportunity the time is now and we are gradually going after it and I will say just like a lot of things you'll see probably in the broader AI space.
Speaker 3: There is not a winner take all dynamic going on here. There's going to be a lot of players. And if you just took, again, the customer service opportunity, millions of establishments that are going to be looking for these types of services. And we certainly think we've got a great start and are going to aggressively try to keep scaling. Awesome. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks, Brett. Thank you. I am showing no further questions in the queue at this time. This concludes today's program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 1: you
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: For your presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker, Scott Smith, head of investor relations.
Speaker 3: Please go ahead. Great, thank you. Good afternoon and thank you for joining our first quarter 2023 conference call.
Speaker 3: With me today is our CEO , Kayvon Mahajer, and our CFO , Nitesh Sharan. We'll begin with some short remarks before moving to Q&A.
Speaker 3: We'd also like to remind everyone that we'll be making forward-looking statements on this call. Natural results could differ materially from those suggested by our forward-looking statement.
Speaker 3: Please refer to our filings with the SEC for a detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could affect our business.
Speaker 3: and those 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 .
Speaker 8: Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date.
Speaker 8: We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Currently this call is being audio webcast in its entirety on our Investor Relations website.
Speaker 8: An audio replay will be available shortly following today's call. With that, I would like to turn the call over to our CEO , Kayvon Mahajer. Please go ahead, Kayvon.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Scott, and thank you to everyone for joining the call today. The start of 2023 was a pivotal time for SandHounds and our path to sustainable and profitable growth. During the quarter, we raised a significant amount of capital, streamlined our organization, reduced our expenses, and reduced our growth.
Speaker 4: And with the launch of SoundHound Chat AI, we unveiled our innovative approach of integrating generative AI and large language models into our full stack of...
Speaker 4: technology for conversational voice AI. And while the first quarter was a transition quarter for us, we overachieved our target and grew our revenue by 56% year over year.
Speaker 4: In our Pillar 1 of revenue, where we powered devices such as cars, TVs and IOTs, we have added several new brands, including a transformational Turkish automotive manufacturer of electrical vehicles. We have also expanded our global reach by adding two brands associated with the Stenantas Group and now have 10 brands with them in total.
Speaker 4: Additionally, we signed a new revolutionary television manufacturer, which is expected to launch later this year. We also closed a new deal with a multinational electronics company and one of the world's largest manufacturers of printers.
Speaker 4: In Q1, the number of cars shipping with time-house technology more than doubled year over year, and we expect the growth to accelerate as more brands sign up and existing customers expand.
Speaker 4: In our Pillar 2 of revenue, where we power customer service applications, we have signed up hundreds of new brands.
Speaker 4: It's important to note that our AI customer service solutions are fully autonomous, which is different from the human-assisted AI solution that other vendors are offering in this particular field. This key differentiator, in addition to giving us much better margins, also enables us to attract brands of all sizes.
from a single location to thousands of locations. Our newly launched TanhanChat AR platform is already positively impacting both Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 revenues.
In Pillar 1, we are seeing demand from existing customers and new brands. We expect faster adoption, better user experience, more frequent usage, and ultimately more revenue per device from our Pillar 1 customers.
In Pillar 2, we are expanding our AI customer service solutions from restaurants to other businesses. We have always envisioned that restaurants are to soundhounds what books were to Amazon. They started by selling books, then over time expanded to other categories, eventually everything from A to Z. Now, thanks to Soundhound chat AI, we are able to accelerate our vision and expand from the top.
Smart answering currently allows a restaurant to automatically upload its menu and enable customers to place orders with their voice assistant over the phone via simple integration with one of our POS partners. Smart answering will allow any business to fill nearly any inbound queries or questions for opening hours, parking, location, typical wait times, and other items.
products and services, appointments and reservations, and more, using an automated assistant over the phone. By automatically incorporating data from the business website, we can significantly accelerate the onboarding, allow the customers to test it within minutes, and be live on the same day.
We are augmenting smart answering with generative AI capabilities so that any voice assistant built on our platform can respond to more open-ended questions with answers that are tailored to a specific business. We address the risk of AI hallucinations using our proprietary TimeHatchat AI platform. AI hallucinations is one of the major weaknesses of generative AI.
compared to a prominent off-the-shelf model. Smart answering helps businesses ranging from hair salons to auto shops manage inbound inquiries in a much more tailored and accurate manner.
Onboarding for smart answering and smart ordering has been streamlined such that we expect adoption to accelerate. We are helping businesses create efficiencies when many are tackling rising costs, staffing shortages, supply chain issues and other headwinds.
No longer will the customer service professional need to break away from serving their cut clients to answer the phone, book appointments, or address basic questions.
Sanham Smart Answering is designed to help businesses optimize human labor while relieving employees of the burden of answering calls so that they can focus on more business critical tasks.
The service also helps businesses cater to the evolving expectation of consumers who increasingly prefer customer service to be automated across channels.
We believe Sanhan's smart answering is the first of its kind in the industry. Until now, only businesses with large capital resources could afford AI-enabled customer service. And even though the quality of such solutions have been historically worse than humans, they still took large upfront investments and long development cycles.
Our Stand-On Smart Answering Solution can be live within minutes with high quality and is for any business, large or small, with affordable pricing. Now, on to our strategic partnerships.
One of the key to success in winning deals with a large number of businesses is the ability to integrate with a variety of point of sale systems that act as the brain center of the businesses. Along with our original point of sale integration with Square, this quarter we went live with our Toast restaurant point of sale integration.
and we've been working closely with our sales organization on our joint go-to-market. In addition, our voice AI is now available on Oracle Macro Symphony POS that can seamlessly help any restaurant accept voice orders over the phone via menu kiosks or at the drive-throughs on their platform.
Oracle has been a great partner and we sincerely value their collaboration. We are also now live with Ola, the leading open SaaS platform for restaurants and are already working with several well-known brands in their customer base.
These strategic channel partnerships expand our reach to hundreds of thousands of new locations. Other strategic partnerships include our collaborations with Qualcomm, Harman and LG.
On technology innovation, which is the core part of the RDNA, we continue to push the boundaries with townhouse chat AI and dynamic interaction.
While SoundTime Chat AI is our innovative integration of generative AI and large language models with our software engineering modules that solve for AI hallucinations and deliver real-time content from our knowledge domains.
Dynamic Interaction is a spur-of-its-kind multimodal full-duplex interface with real-time, continuous audio, visual and touch feedback loop with no wave force, awkward pauses or turn-taking.
It ignores off-topic speech, makes proactive suggestions to the user, and intelligently decides when to use audio or visual output. Dynamic interaction is a category-defining breakthrough for human-computer interaction and still unmatched by any other technology out there today.
We initially launched dynamic interaction in a drive-through ordering experience. Then, early this year, we combined dynamic interaction with our existing generative AI technology that we've been working on since 2019.
And as we did last year with dynamic interaction for restaurants, we brought ourselves one step closer to our ultimate vision of making computers better than humans in language understanding and more human in the way they interact and respond. There is a lot of enthusiasm around AI, and it's important to distinguish the companies that have the technology to back it up.
SoundHound is one of those companies. My co-founders and I, nearly two decades ago at a Stanford University dorm room, predicted that within our lifetime computers would become better than humans in language understanding. And we created SoundHound to pursue that vision and make the world a better place.
Over the years of constant innovation, we have seen and benefited from real disruptions, such as the mobile ecosystem transformation. We have also been able to avoid distractions from short-lasting hype, such as the messenger bots and smart speaker skills that did not result in mass adoption.
But now, we absolutely believe the impact of generative AI and large language models is indeed a disruption. We expect its impact to be larger than the mobile ecosystem transformation.
We believe nearly every business can be transformed, new user experiences will be unveiled rapidly, and users are ready and eager to adapt these new experiences.
We are clearly at the intersection of demand and technology readiness for conversational AI, and we view the market impact of the resulting momentum in our field to be transformative.
The real opportunity is for nimble companies with the right experience and also the tenacity to move fast.
It's for companies that have the experience and foundation to understand and utilize the strength of the new AI models while being aware of the weaknesses and solving them using their experience and their own core technologies. SoundHound is one of those companies.
The spark of new wave of innovation has occurred and there is a lot more to come. We are enabling more tasks to be automated, whether driving in a car using a smart device or through customer service. We see AI not just becoming more efficient and more effective than humans, but also more consistent and reliable, to the extent that consumers will ultimately prefer to interact with the world.
with an agent powered by conversational AI when transactions with a business.
The predictability of the AI technology can ultimately eliminate many of the variables that lead to an unsatisfactory user and customer experience. We believe our products are creating more opportunities for interaction and consequently the increased usage translates to more relevancy for product creators and service-oriented businesses looking to drive further adoption.
for their customers and ultimately more demand for SoundHound's products and services. SoundHound is in a unique position to take advantage of this rare moment thanks to our advanced and comprehensive technologies, mature products, and existing customer base. In our view, SoundHound's conversational AI in our view
Conversational AI can't be done as a side project. It can't be achieved by simply integrating a few external APIs. Creating the necessary technologies to win in conversational AI takes time. By owning all the core pieces of the engine that we have built from the ground up over the many years, we have a distinct competitive advantage.
To all the investors and stakeholders that have stood by us from the beginning, and the many new ones that continue to show interest in our vision, our technology, and what it can do to create tremendous value for businesses and consumers alike, we thank you for your continued support and look forward to further engagement. I also wanted to take the time to acknowledge all our employees.
I am proud to collaborate with such an amazing team and want to thank them for their tireless efforts to get us to where we are today and paving the path to where we will be tomorrow. In closing, we have grown our revenues by over 56%, reduced our expenses by over 40%, significantly improved our balance sheet and are seeing strong demand for our products and solutions.
We are innovating faster than ever and are in a position of strength to not only maintain our leadership in core voice-enabled AI technology, but further gain traction as enterprises are increasingly realizing that they have a time-sensitive need for sound house technologies.
We are confident we have the right strategy and see that our technology is resonating every day. We remain agile and focused and are right where we need to be to reach our goals forexcuse us.
With that, I will now turn the call over to Nitesh to talk about our financial performance for the quarter.
Thank you, Kayvon, and good afternoon, everyone. We are pleased to report another strong quarter with 56% year-over-year top-line growth while demonstrating steady progress in driving efficiencies and improving cash flow. From the start of the year, we set out to significantly strengthen our liquidity position, and we have now done that.
We initially raised enough capital to see us through to profitability, and just last month we closed our new debt refinancing that will fund us well beyond that. Despite a choppy funding market, we were able to successfully execute these financings on the foundations of our technology and deep patent portfolio, along with significant customer adoption in attractive end markets.
We also stayed focused on the business and the opportunity in front of us. Our official intelligence is rightly getting a lot of attention these days, and our opportunity has only expanded. At SoundHound, we make conversations with technology more natural and seamless, and the demand for that has only become stronger.
Large language models, generative AI, and the pervasiveness of chatbots are unearthing entirely new use cases every day. The opportunity set and adoption curves will accelerate rapidly, and we are at the forefront of this next major inflection in technology.
We continue to expand our voice-enabled ecosystem and have strong growth.
even with Q1 typically our seasonally smallest quarter of the year from a revenue standpoint. This could have only been possible with our strong customer engagement and streamlined execution that we expect will only further improve from here.
Our business model is grounded in the three pillar revenue framework. Pillar one represents voice enabled products where we receive royalties. Pillar two represents voice enabled services generally under monthly subscription contracts.
And then we bring Pillar 1 and 2 together into Pillar 3, Monetization, Driving Meaningful and Relevant Advertising and Transactional Interactions.
As we've discussed previously, the bulk of our current business and backlog is in Pillar 1, and in Q1, our cumulative bookings backlog was 336 million of 46% year-over-year. That level expanded with more than 10 million of new gross bookings in the quarter with deals across auto, devices, and other IoT manufacturers. In this pillar, we continue to extend our offering across new units, including the latest
while adding more features to existing ones to expand revenue per unit. We can scale with existing customers and we are constantly adding new ones. In automotive, for example, we saw over 2x growth in units and also realized unit price expansion in Q1. And there are some really exciting new brands in our pipeline.
Growing our Pillar 2 voice-enabled services is a key focus area, starting with AI-enabled customer services for restaurants. The demand is real, and one advantage here is the pace at which we can scale because of the much shorter sales cycle and activation timeline. I mentioned last quarter how our advanced pipeline of stores was well into the thousands, and we continue to expand that meaningfully in Q1. Through the end of last year, our pipeline largely consisted of small chains and regional brands.
point-of-sale system. Already live with Square and Toast, these systems like Ollo and Oracle MicroSymphony extend our offering into hundreds of thousands of new locations.
We mentioned expansion into other areas of customer service with new solutions for smart answering and smart ordering that are vertical agnostic and can be deployed by any business that is looking to gain an edge on their competition and significantly improve their customer experience. To quantify that further, we are basically expanding the immediate addressable opportunity for smart desk traffic across the Facebook page.
expected to become a very meaningful revenue driver.
Let us now get specific on our financial results for the first quarter.
In Q1, we generated $6.7 million in revenue, up 56% year-over-year, driven by strong growth in our product royalties and strength in automotive. Our product loyalty revenue increased primarily due to strong customer momentum and expansion with key global brands. Our long-term commitments demonstrate the continued strong partnerships we've developed and the continued share gains we are experiencing.
In Q1, our gross margin improved to 71%, up from 59% in the prior year quarter, which was largely driven by the expanding scale of our business, migration of cloud services, and increased data center efficiency.
Cost of revenue for the quarter was $2 million, up 11% from the prior year Q1. The majority of our cost of revenue includes data center costs supporting our customer production environments. We also continue to migrate some on-premise activities to the cloud, helping us drive further gross margin expansion as we scale the business.
Operating expenses saw a step function reduction in Q1 compared to the previous quarter as we executed our announced corporate restructuring program. Operating expenses in Q1 were $3.6 million.
The full benefit of our cost reductions are expected to be realized as we move into Q2 and beyond, while expected restructuring expenses should be minimal in future quarters. Our de-expenses were $14.2 million in Q1, a decrease of 15% year-over-year and 34% sequentially, largely due to the restructuring action.
We delivered this by successfully completing our ambitious language development plans while bringing to market key innovation in both dynamic interaction and soundhound chat AI in Q1. Notably, our investment in key areas has not slowed as we continue to build out our voice AI platform and leverage our deep patent portfolio.
We intend to remain at the forefront of innovation in the rapidly evolving ecosystems of artificial intelligence and machine learning while also helping to develop and scale our cloud offerings and other products and services.
In sales and marketing, we also saw a sequential expense reduction, although year over year we saw an increase from prior Q1 when we hadn't fully yet begun building out this organization. We continue to streamline our focus on digital marketing, lead generation, and customer acquisition, both direct and through channel partners. In Q1, sales and marketing expenses were $4.9 million, up 89% year over year.
and down 28% sequentially. With our organizational shifts in 2023, we expect this expense item to benefit from greater focus. G&A expenses were $7.1 million in Q1, down sequentially, though up 78% year-over-year.
In the prior year Q1, we were not yet a public company, and this year-over-year increase largely reflects investments across the global support functions of finance, legal facilities, and human resources necessary for a public company.
Across all operating expenses, non-cash employee stock compensation was $6 million in Q1, excluding the expenses associated with restructuring. Our operating loss was $25 million, an improvement of approximately $3.7 million from the prior quarter. Net loss was $26.4 million in Q1, an improvement of approximately $4.3 million from the prior quarter.
This led to a net loss per share in Q1 of 13 cents and improvement of 2 cents from the prior quarter. Without the one-time impact of restructuring Q1, all these metrics would have been improved even more. Adjustity Betta, which excludes non-cash charges of stock compensation and depreciation and amortization, as well as other non-operating activities, including restructuring, and lowering.
was a loss of $14.8 million, which was 21 percent better than the loss of $18.6 million last quarter and an improvement of 13 percent year-over-year. Operating cash flow in Q1 was $14.5 million use of cash, improving roughly 30 percent sequentially and also improved versus a prior year Q1.
Now, on to the capital structure, where we've made great progress in strengthening our balance sheet. Our cash position at quarter end was $46.3 million.
In January , we successfully raised $25 million in preferred equity. Our previously announced committed equity line of credit also became effective, giving us additional access to capital, upon which we raised approximately $29 million in Q1.
In addition, after quarter-end, we raised $100 million of debt financing, which we partially used to pay off our existing debt of approximately $30 million and eliminate the associated principal amortization payments. Since we've fallen, our balance sheet has strengthened meaningfully.
And we have a fully funded business plan to drive growth and differentiation and provide cushion regardless of how the macroeconomic landscape evolves from here. Our capital position is now a source of strength.
that we will leverage to drive our business aggressively forward while staying streamlined and delivering on our profitability targets. With that, I'll move to guidance.
This year we took actions to set the stage for sustained long-term profitable growth. We are pleased with the momentum we have seen start the year and are encouraged with the momentum we continue to see from customers. Accordingly, we reaffirm our 2023 guidance and continue to expect that revenue will be in the range of $43 million to $50 million.
As we noted last quarter, we expect this revenue will build through the year due to seasonality of Pillar 1 and the scaling of Pillar 2 with restaurants and customer services more broadly. We also continue to expect to become adjusted EBITDA positive in Q4 of this year. We're moving to Q&A.
I would also like to comment on expectations for other income and expenses in Q2 and impacts from the recent debt refinancing.
Given the various transaction-related fees and other charges, we expect roughly $6 million to $6.5 million of expense in the quarter associated with one-time transaction fees, expected ongoing amortization impacts, and quarterly interest costs. This is different from the historical level, so I wanted to highlight this expectation.
To summarize, we have taken the important steps to set us up for long-term success. We are driving significant market differentiation, delivering on customer demand, and catalyzing disruptive innovation with a high velocity. Each quarter on our journey brings its own unique dynamics.
Yet we are steadily stitching together the foundations for sustainable long-term growth and profitability.
Thank you. We will now move to Q&A. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again.
One moment while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question will come from the line of Mike Lattimore with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Great, thanks. Yeah, congrats on all the progress this quarter. I guess just two basic technology questions. Can you elaborate a little bit more on why SoundHound can prevent these generative AI hallucinations? Just a little bit more detail on why you're differentiated in that regard.
Yes, so we... there are actually multiple problems that we are able to fix with our chat.ai platform. I want this hallucination for...
generative AI language models produce incorrect results, but they sound amazing. So it's very... makes them more dangerous. The other problem they have is they are stale. They don't have access to real-time information. And some of the answers that provide used to be correct, but are no longer correct.
And the way we saw this is we even have this yin-yang diagram that we have two models. One is called kai-lan, one is called kai-nes.
Kylan is conversation AI language. Kynet is conversation AI network. The first one is the software engineering approach.
The second one is machine learning approach. And the way we combine them, we are able to get the best of both.
We get this strength of machine learning model that can scale really well. We also get the benefit of soft ranging approach.
that doesn't suffer from these unpredictable and undesired consequences. So it's a lot of magic that goes into how we integrate these, but...
The result is we can reduce the hallucinations, we can detect when machine learning is providing an asset that's not correct. We also can detect when we need to go to external APIs or get real-time information from other sources.
And also we have domains that don't do well with generative AI models, things like navigation to addresses and business search that you need these large data structures. So by combining the two, we really get the best of both. And that's the...
huge value that Chat.ai has created. And we have an app that is live that people can test. There's a lot more behind the app. It's a platform that we're offering to our Pillar One customers, the car makers, IoT makers, and we are using the same techniques with our customer service applications.
value that Chat.ai has created. And we have an app that is live that people can test. There's a lot more behind the app. It's a platform that we're offering to our Pillar One customers, the car makers, IoT makers. And we are using the same techniques with our customer service applications. Got it. Great. That's problem.
With regard to the cost controls, where should we model kind of OPEX bonding? Once it's all into the modeling, what would be the absolute amount of OPEX you would have in a quarter?
Well, I guess I will go back a little bit to what I said last time. I had indicated that on an annualized basis we expected through the corporate restructuring actions that we would see about a $60 million reduction in OPEX. And so if you take kind of last year was, I think it was close to $136 million.
They kind of chop off $60 million from that. And then this quarter was a little bit of we executed the action, so there was a sort of partial quarter impact. So I think in Q2, you'll see largely there's still some international and some other pieces, but by and large, we're through it. And so you'll probably see kind of the full extent of it in Q2 and onwards. And then —
Um, you know, I don't know if part of your question was where will you feel like it is really spread across the line items. So we, we had impacts across R and D sales and marketing G and a. And it was relatively balanced across all of them. So does that answer your question?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Great. And I guess just last one on the smart ordering and smart answering. You know, you've talked about obviously the restaurant vertical. A couple of the incremental verticals you mentioned were kind of more retail, you know, like auto shops, I think, like, how broadly is that applicable in customer service? Like, can you get into the general general service?
I don't know, insurance and healthcare as well, which may be a little bit more complicated, or is it more kind of that retail focus? Yeah, good question. It's meant to be very broad. The initial rollout will be for targeting smaller businesses.
So less on the, you know, insurance companies that they can serve those two, but they require engagement and collaboration. Store-in-house ordering is meant to be completely self-service. So you could be a 1% business or in a business with, you know, 75 employees and multiple locations you can discover the service and sign up on your own and be live on the same day. And it has coveredAR
We do utilize your website if you have one. If you don't have one, that's okay, but if you have a website, you're able to pre-populate a lot of the information from your website, and all you have to do is just examine the information that you've extracted and validated. It really could be live. You could go live on the same day as you discovered the feature. Okay, great. That makes sense. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. Thank you. One moment for our next question. And that will come from the line of Brett No-Block.
with Cancer Fitzgerald. Your line is open. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess the first is on the bookings backlog. It kind of increased by the slowest amount or a much slower pace than it has over the most recent quarters. Is this kind of like what you expected going into the quarter? How should we think about it? Yeah, I'll start, Brett. So I think, you know,
I'll start with yes, you know, we know that Q1 tends to so seasonally it tends to be a little softer Just generally for the business part of that is still in the heavy kind of rhythm of
the influence of the auto business in our overall business. And so the deals tend to be lumpy and we had some acceleration of stuff prior year. We know things will happen that some things are still in motion that haven't necessarily closed at the end of Q1. So it was by and large in the zone of what we expected. To your highlight, try to review all the deteriorated practices that we're Havana passive and they ends up in mobil Bowen exhibitions.
You know, 1 other thing that we've been highlighting now, I certainly talked about last quarter is, is our business shifts and we emphasize the pillar 2 opportunity. Particularly take restaurants as an example. We aren't necessarily reflecting those and bookings. And so, you know, we, as we talked about as we scale that, and we move into pillar 2, pillar 3, you'll be hearing more about.
other type recurring type metrics they are and so forth. So there's a little bit of composition of the deals we're focused on. There's a little bit of just normal seasonality, and these things can be lumpy. So quite honestly, this is probably a metric better considered on an annualized basis versus even quarterly check-ins. But I obviously want to give a milestone as to how things are moving. So that's the overall kind of in line. And I'd say it's a quarter when I look at it, when I look at the top line perspective, when I look at where we are in movement towards profitability goals that we put out there..
I generally would characterize this as an inline quarter across most of the metrics. Obviously, you can't dial it to the T on anything, but that's how I kind of characterize the whole quarter in general. Perfect. And I guess just on the full year outlook, right, it implies quite significant acceleration over the last three quarters. Can you maybe help us out from a modeling perspective and give us some weights that we should expect in terms of when we should expect revenue to fall throughout the remainder of the year? Yeah, I'll go back to something we said last quarter.
from an operating standpoint, we expect to be able to scale meaningfully with this sort of cost footprint. So as you get into the ramping of revenue, and we also said like, we expect revenue to build every corner, meaning Q2 will be higher than Q3, Q3 will be higher than Q2, Q4 will be higher than Q3. You know, we model that as getting to just the V beta and Q4 positive.
Got it. And then maybe just some comments on the competitive landscape. I think the news this week was Wendy's is using a Google AI to power their drive-through ordering system. Obviously, this is a phase that you guys have been trying to break into and have been quite positive on over the last several quarters.
How are you competing with Google on this front? Do you see them when competing for a new deal? Do you expect to see them? Should we view this as a you versus Google type of market? Just any comments there. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Yes, mostly it's validation of the space because in the last couple of weeks we've seen a whole bunch of announcements and our visibility is that these were POCs that, you know, the a piece of this place was this place.
the restaurant customers saw benefit in announcing it to show they are innovating in the space. That is very important. So, net positive and very much validating.
In terms of our view is that some of the big tech players, they have cloud deals. And to win the cloud, they bundle voice AI and it's not really the core part of their offering. But they do lead to some POCs.
Our view is that some of the big tech players, they have cloud deals, and to win the cloud, they bundle voice AI, and it's not really the core part of their offering, but they do lead to some POCs in terms of the...
Technology competitiveness, the dynamic interaction that we really highlight in our drive-thru is very much unmatched. When we present it to our customers, nothing comes close to it. So it's just a matter of education and presenting it to putting it in front of the brand. And it's rapidly becoming...
from something that is novel and you have to convince customers that they should pay attention to it, to something that they are realizing they need it and it's time sensitive. So it's very much a validation.
positive update in the last few weeks. Maybe I'll just build on that. There's a couple points. One is you always got to respect competition, then you got to fight aggressively against it. I do think we should highlight more broadly, and we've talked a little bit about this, just to double click on Kayvon's.
comments and is prepared to mark and even response to earlier questions. Like we have been in this for a while. We have the core technology. We have deep end patent portfolio. Generative AI brings a lot to the table here and we can uniquely sort of bring the best of all the worlds to improve the technology. And a real key differentiator when you look more broadly at the players that are trying to enter the space in the particularly quick service restaurant.
It's sort of supplemented with humans in the background. So people will claim a order completion rate is a success metric in the high percentages, 85 plus percent. And the reality is when you look underneath it, they have very low gross margins. It could tell you that they have a lot of humans operating in the background. And it's not apples to apples versus ours is fully automated. And we can get that level exceeding human performance with some of the restaurants we've been working with for a long time now, really fully automated. And that is good for the restaurant, good for the customer, good for our margin profile.
And so there's real differences out there. I think as Kayvon started with, it's very validating of the massive opportunity. The time is now and we are aggressively going after it. And I will say, just like a lot of things you'll see probably in the broader AI space, there is not a winner take all dynamic going on here. There's gonna be a lot of players. And if you just took, again, the customer service opportunity, millions of establishments that are gonna be looking for these types of services.
And we certainly think we've got a great start and are going to aggressively try to keep scaling. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thanks, Brett. Thank you. I am showing no further questions in the queue at this time. This concludes today's program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.