Restaurant AI Wins Accelerate: Can SoundHound Dominate QSRs?

SoundHound AI, Inc. SOUN delivered a record-setting second-quarter 2025, with revenue surging 217% year over year to $42.7 million. While growth was broad-based, the restaurant vertical emerged as a standout, underscoring the company’s ambition to dominate the quick-service restaurant (QSR) landscape.

SoundHound expanded its footprint to over 14,000 restaurant locations, adding major names like IHOP, Red Lobster, and Peter Piper Pizza, while deepening relationships with existing customers such as Chipotle, MOD Pizza, and Firehouse Subs. The company also launched strategic partnerships with Acrelec and Par Technologies, aiming to accelerate AI adoption across global QSR chains. These moves position SoundHound as a leading provider of voice-enabled ordering, customer support, and drive-thru automation solutions.

Management emphasized the traction of its Amelia 7 agentic AI platform and its proprietary Polaris foundation model, which are boosting renewals and upsells. Importantly, Voice Commerce is gaining momentum, promising to link QSRs with automakers and merchants in a seamless ecosystem that could drive future monetization.

Yet challenges remain. SoundHound faces intense competition from both established tech giants and niche AI players. Profitability is still on the horizon, with the second quarter showing a non-GAAP net loss of $11.9 million. Execution risk in scaling restaurant deployments and managing hardware partnerships could also slow momentum.

Still, with strong customer wins, a growing QSR presence, and a differentiated technology stack, SoundHound is carving out a compelling growth story in restaurant AI.

SoundHound’s Competitors in the Restaurant AI Race

As SoundHound deepens its presence in quick-service restaurants, it faces formidable competition from Amazon AMZN and Alphabet’s Google GOOGL. These tech giants bring unmatched scale, brand recognition, and AI capabilities that make them significant rivals.

Amazon, through Alexa and AWS, has long been a leader in voice-enabled technologies. Alexa’s integrations into smart devices, retail platforms, and experimental restaurant applications give Amazon a strong foothold. For QSR operators seeking established ecosystems and cloud infrastructure, Amazon remains a powerful competitor to SoundHound.

Google has equally strong credentials in conversational AI, particularly with its Dialogflow platform. Google’s natural language processing expertise and cloud dominance make it a key player in restaurant automation. QSR brands leveraging Google Cloud often tap into Dialogflow for customer interactions, creating direct overlap with SoundHound’s offerings.

Together, Amazon and Google represent deep-pocketed competitors that could pressure SoundHound’s ability to secure long-term dominance in QSR AI.

SOUN’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

SoundHound’s shares have gained 28.3% in the past three months, against the Zacks Computers - IT Services industry’s 8.8% decline.

SOUN Price Performance

In terms of its forward 12-month price-to-sales ratio, SOUN is trading at 25.35, up from the industry’s 17.21.

P/S (F12M)

Over the past 30 days, the Zacks Consensus Estimate for SOUN’s 2025 loss per share has narrowed to 13 cents from 16 cents. The estimated figure indicates an improvement from the year-ago loss of $1.04 per share.
 

SOUN currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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