Cerence Inc

This Proxy Statement provides information for shareholders of Cerence, as part of the solicitation of proxies by the Company and its Board of Directors from holders of the outstanding shares of the Company’s common stock (“Common Stock”), for use at the 2025 Annual Meeting. This summary highlights select information that is provided in more detail throughout this Proxy Statement. This summary does not contain all the information that you should consider before voting. You should read the full Proxy Statement before casting your vote. In this Proxy Statement, the terms “Cerence,” “the Company,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to Cerence Inc.

2025 Annual Meeting

Voting Items

The following table summarizes the proposals to be considered at the 2025 Annual Meeting and the voting recommendations of the Board of Directors with respect to each proposal.

Important Notice Regarding the Internet Availability of Proxy Materials for the Annual Meeting of Shareholders to be Held on February 13, 2025

We are furnishing proxy materials to our shareholders primarily via the Internet. On or about December 31, 2024, we will mail to our shareholders a Notice of Internet Availability containing instructions on how to access our proxy materials, including the Proxy Statement and our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024. The Notice of Internet Availability also instructs you on how to submit your proxy or voting instructions through the Internet or to request a paper copy of our proxy materials, including a proxy card or voting instruction form that includes instructions on how to submit your proxy or voting instructions by mail or telephone. Other shareholders, in accordance with their prior requests, have received e-mail access to our proxy materials and instructions to submit their vote via the Internet, or have been mailed paper copies of our proxy materials and a proxy card or voting instruction form.

This Proxy Statement and our Annual Report on Form 10-K are available for viewing, printing and downloading at www.proxydocs.com/CRNC.

A copy of our Annual Report on Form 10-K, as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) on November 25, 2024, will be furnished without charge to any shareholder upon written request to Cerence Inc., 25 Mall Road, Suite 416, Burlington, MA 01803, Attention: Corporate Secretary.

This Proxy Statement and our Annual Report on Form 10-K are also available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.

Business Overview

Cerence builds AI powered virtual assistants for the mobility/transportation market. Our primary target is the automobile market, but our solutions can apply to all forms of transportation including but not limited to two-wheel vehicles, planes, tractors, cruise ships and elevators as well as non-transportation markets including medical, enterprise, wearables, and Internet of Things (“IoT”). Our solutions power natural conversational and intuitive interactions between vehicles, drivers and passengers, and the broader digital world. We are a premier provider of AI-powered assistants and innovations for connected and autonomous vehicles, including one of the world’s most popular software platforms for building automotive virtual assistants, such as “Hey BMW” and “Ni hao Banma”. Our customers include nearly all major automobile original equipment manufacturers (“OEMs”), or their tier 1 suppliers worldwide, including BMW, Daimler, FCA Group, Ford, Geely, GM, Renault-Nissan, SAIC, Toyota, Volkswagen Group, Aptiv, Bosch, Continental, DENSO TEN, NIO, XPeng and Harman. We deliver our solutions on a white-label basis, enabling our customers to deliver customized virtual assistants with unique, branded personalities and ultimately strengthening the bond between their brands and end users. Our vision is to enable a more enjoyable, safer journey for everyone.

Our platform utilizes industry-leading speech recognition, natural language understanding, speech signal enhancement, text-to-speech, and acoustic modeling technology to provide a conversational AI-based solution. Virtual assistants built with our platform can enable a wide variety of modes of human-vehicle interaction, including speech, touch, handwriting, gaze tracking and gesture recognition, and can support the integration of third-party virtual assistants into the in-vehicle experience.

Our software platform is a market leader for building integrated, branded and differentiated virtual assistants for automobiles. As a unified platform and common interface for automotive cognitive assistance, our software platform provides OEMs and suppliers with an important control point with respect to the mobility experience and their brand value. Our platform is fully customizable and designed to support our customers in creating their own ecosystem in the automobile and transforming the vehicle into a hub for numerous connected devices and services. Virtual assistants built with our software platform can address user requests across a wide variety of categories, such as navigation, control, media, communication and tools. Our software platform is comprised of edge computing and cloud-connected software components and a software framework linking these components together under a common programming interface. We implement our software platform for our customers through our professional services organization, which works with OEMs and suppliers to optimize our software for the requirements, configurations and acoustic characteristics of specific vehicle models.

Our solutions have been installed in more than 500 million automobiles to date, including over 46 million new vehicles in fiscal year 2024 alone. Based on royalty reports provided by our customers and third-party reports of total vehicle production worldwide, we estimate that approximately 52% of all cars shipped during the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024 included Cerence technologies. Cerence hybrid solutions shipped on approximately 13 million vehicles during the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024. In aggregate, over 80 OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers worldwide use our solutions, covering over 70 languages and dialects, including English, German, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Hindi.

Since October 1, 2019, we have been an independent publicly-traded company on The Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “CRNC,” after our former parent company, Nuance Communications, Inc. (“Nuance”), completed the legal and structural separation and distribution to its shareholders of all our then outstanding shares (the “Spin Off”).

Recent Event Highlights

Fiscal year 2024 held many accomplishments across Cerence as we work to advance the future of the in-car experience. We secured important customer wins globally, including securing 28 design wins, including ten for our generative artificial intelligence (“Generative AI”) solutions introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (“CES”) 2024; securing six new wins in the two-wheeler and trucking markets; achieving competitive displacements with major OEMs in China, Japan, and EMEA; and advancing our product strategy incorporating the latest achievements in Generative AI and Large Language Models (“LLMs”) and shipping more Generative AI programs than any of our competitors.

In fiscal year 2024, we advanced our long-term product strategy in response to the significant advancements in Generative AI and LLMs introduced during the fiscal year. This resulted in the introduction of several Generative AI solutions at CES 2024, leading to major customer programs with Volkswagen Group, as well as the first customer signed for our next-gen, LLM-based platform.

We also recently welcomed our new Chief Executive Officer, Brian Krzanich, who has a successful track record of driving large-scale business transformations, fostering innovation and achieving growth. We believe that Mr. Krzanich’s leadership skills and expertise in AI and cloud computing makes him the right leader to guide Cerence through its transition.

Cerence believes good governance is critical to achieving long-term shareholder value. We are committed to governance practices and policies that serve the long-term interests of the Company and its shareholders. The following summarizes certain recent enhancements to our corporate governance practices and policies:

•

updated the Audit Committee’s charter to explicitly include in its responsibilities oversight of cybersecurity exposures and mitigation;

•

reconstituted the Nominating & Governance Committee, including appointing a new Committee Chairperson; and

•

reviewed and evolved our overall Board composition and leadership.

Board of Directors

Our Board of Directors has a diverse mix of directors with complementary qualifications, skills, expertise, experience and attributes, which is essential to ensuring effective oversight of our business strategy and corporate governance practices. The members of the Board currently are:

All independent directors being nominated for re-election at the 2025 Annual Meeting have extensive professional experience relevant to their service on our Board. The chart below highlights specific areas in which we believe our independent directors have particularly deep experience relevant to such current profile and strategic needs.

Board Diversity Matrix

We value diversity and believe that diversity among the directors as to professional and personal experiences is desirable, and the board diversity matrix below summarizes certain self-identified personal characteristics of our Board members as of November 13, 2024. No directors self-identified as a person with a disability or military veteran.

Corporate Governance

We are committed to good corporate governance, which we believe promotes the long-term interests of our shareholders, fosters sustained business success, and strengthens our Board of Directors and management accountability. We have the following practices in place to assist us in managing risk in order to promote the long-term interests of our shareholders.