With Nearly 40% Short Interest, Is SoundHound Stock a Buy or Sell?

With about 40% short interest, SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN) is one of the most shorted stocks in the market. The company has been growing its revenue quickly, but a pending merger with troubled LivePerson (NASDAQ: LPSN) has investors betting against the stock. However, heavy short interest is a double-edged sword.

If a stock has high short interest, there is usually a bearish case to be made against it. In the case of SoundHound AI, its merger with LivePerson will bring considerable debt and a business currently in decline. There is also a good chance that SoundHound AI will seek a future equity raise to pay off the debt it is taking on as part of the deal, as it has stated it will work to quickly retire the debt through a combination of cash and stock.

The flip side is that heavily shorted stocks can see huge short squeezes if they can prove the skeptics wrong. With LivePerson, SoundHound AI is gaining access to a large, established, albeit declining, customer base, especially in call centers and the customer service space.

Its goal will be to retain these customers and switch them to its more comprehensive and higher-priced AI voice technology and agentic AI platform. If the company can stabilize churn and upsell customers, this deal could be a huge boon for this growth stock.

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SoundHound AI's core business, meanwhile, continues to perform well, and it's already shown it can integrate acquisitions well. Its earlier purchase of Amelia and its virtual agents helped it expand into new market verticals and provided key technology for its new voice-native agentic AI orchestration platform, OASYS.

The company has said that the launch of OASYS has increased excitement and accelerated deals, and that it is winning in demos, RFPs (requests for proposals), and pilots. The platform's ability to build AI agents and self-improve has been a big selling point, and it has been seeing pilots convert to large implementations at a record pace. Management noted that the platform has seen rapid adoption across verticals since its May launch, including a large eight-figure deal signed in less than 90 days after the initial demo.

Overall for Q2, SoundHound AI saw its revenue climb 45% to $61.9 million. However, the company does remain unprofitable, with an adjusted loss of $0.02 and negative adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of $9.6 million. Its gross margin rose 610 basis points year over year to 45.1%, while its adjusted gross margins were flat year over year at 58.4%. It said acquisitions continued to have a temporary impact on its gross margins and that its goal is to still exceed 70% in the future.

Looking ahead, the company raised the low end of its full-year revenue guidance to $230 million to $260 million. That's up from a prior outlook of $225 million to $260 million. It is expecting its acquisition of LivePerson to close by the end of the year. If it does, it is projected to generate at least $350 million of revenue in 2027.

Is the stock a buy or sell?

SoundHound AI's stock has struggled over the past year, with its shares cut in half. However, the stock is still not cheap, trading at a forward price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of over 12 times current-year estimates. With the company not profitable and burning cash, that alone makes it a more speculative bet. The acquisition of LivePerson, meanwhile, adds some additional risk.

That said, the company has shown it can do a good job integrating acquisitions, and it has a huge opportunity with OASYS, both with existing customers and the ones it is acquiring from LivePerson.

Despite the huge short interest, I think investors can place a small speculative bet that SoundHound AI can pull this deal off, given the early momentum it has been seeing with OASYS.

Geoffrey Seiler has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends SoundHound AI. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.