Sesame, a conversational AI startup founded by Oculus veterans that launched to the public in May 2020 with $104 million in funding, has raised an additional $250 million in Series B funding and opened up a short waitlist for Sesame’s own AI companion while offering more insight into its device strategy — a high-stakes bet aiming to bring naturally speaking AI companions not just to our virtual worlds but ultimately out into the real world inside a pair of lightweight smart glasses.
Founded by former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe and Ankit Kumar, who previously was CTO at AR startup Ubiquity6, Sesame is creating an AI assistant that can not only respond to commands but talk with rich conversational language and tone.
The company intends to build the assistant into stylish, all-day eyewear, and early testers are going hands-on through an iOS app.
Who Is Building Sesame, and Why It Matters
Sesame’s founder bench is relatively deep for a young company that’s going after both advanced AI as well as consumer hardware. Alongside Iribe and Kumar, the team’s early lineup includes Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell as chief product officer; former Oculus and Fitbit operator Hans Hartmann as COO; Reality Labs’ engineering leader Ryan Brown; and a longtime Facebooker. That talent and focus is significant because good AI is only half the battle, while delivering it in a device someone actually wants to wear is the other.
The Series B funding comes from Sequoia and Spark Capital, as well as a group of backers who weren’t disclosed. The size of the raise underscores the belief among investors that real-time, voice-native agents — and the wearables upon which they sit — are approaching an inflection point.
A Voice Engine That Works In Real Conversation
Sesame first launched from stealth in February with two demo voices, “Maya” and “Miles,” which together attracted over a million users who generated more than five million minutes of conversation, according to an investor note from Sequoia. Reviewers at The Verge described the experience as natural and fun, citing a key differentiator: Sesame’s system doesn’t just read off text from a language model — it runs to produce and generate speech as a first-class output, one that carries rhythm, emotion, and timing more similar to human back-and-forth.
Why is that important? For the most part, assistants today still think audio is an afterthought, where you just pipe text into a TTS layer and get weird pauses or robotic cadences. By natively modeling the actual experience of conversation — turn-taking, interruptions, and expressive delivery — Sesame hopes to minimize those awkward bits on which so many voice tools founder, feeling more like interfaces than companions. In a world of talkative agents, low latency and human-like prosody become product features just as important as accuracy.
Smart Glasses Ambition And Hardware Edge
Sesame plans to concentrate its future glasses on high-quality audio as well as using an AI that “sees the world with you,” referring to an ambient assistant it believes can take action proactively, rather than just waiting to get commands from a user. Sequoia notes that the frames are being designed to be style-first, something it says was a key takeaway from consumer wearables — if you don’t look good in it you won’t wear it.
The hardware push puts Sesame in a competitive landscape that includes Meta’s Ray-Ban line and a host of AI wearables searching for new ways to help users work without using their hands. Where Sesame is different is its bet on voice as the key interface and a conversational layer that actually seems human rather than, you know, a bot. And that strategy could avoid the pitfalls of camera-based devices by enabling utility through audio presence and context.
Beta Access and What Early Testers Can Expect
In conjunction with its funding, Iribe also unveiled an early beta version of the Sesame iOS app that will provide a small group of testers with access to what he calls the AI’s core capabilities — “search, text, and think.” For now, the pilot program is private, as in we’ll fly quietly, and you share any juicy details within official forums while the team iterates on reliability, safety, and user experience.
This staged rollout is a classic playbook for systems that trade in nuance. Voice agents require real-world usage in order to perfect barge-in handling (when a user can interrupt the voice agent), conversational memory, and context handoffs across tasks, and learnings from the app will inform how they approach the interaction model for Sesame’s glasses.
Competitive Stakes and What to Watch Next
Big platforms are coalescing around real-time agents: OpenAI has demonstrated voice-first interactions, Google has released demos of multimodal assistants interpreting the scene, and Amazon is re-architecting Alexa with a brainstem based on a large language model. The engineering tempo is fast, but the experience that will win might hinge on three practical points: a natural voice that enables real conversation; lag time low enough to feel immediate; and a form factor people don’t mind wearing in public.
Top questions include: battery life necessary to keep the audio going all day, split of processing between on-device and cloud work, privacy controls around always-listening microphones, and whether Sesame can get partnerships with eyewear brands so they come out of the gate fully supported. If the company can turn its promising demos into reliable, stylish hardware, with so much capital and Oculus-honed product instincts behind them, they’ve probably got as good a shot as anyone at defining what your first mainstream AI companion that you actually keep on your head looks like.
