Sesame, a conversational AI startup and sensible glasses maker, has raised a $250 million Sequence B spherical and is opening up its beta to a choose group of testers, the corporate introduced Tuesday.
The startup, headed by former Oculus co-founder and CEO Brendan Iribe and Ankit Kumar, former CTO of AR startup Ubiquity6, is working to create a private AI agent that interacts with customers utilizing a natural-sounding human voice. The corporate plans to embed the non-public AI agent into light-weight eyewear that’s designed to be worn all through the day and that customers can work together with by way of voice.
The startup first emerged from stealth in February, providing two demos of its expertise — AI voices named “Maya” and “Miles.” The voices have been quickly accessed by greater than 1,000,000 folks inside the first few weeks, who generated greater than 5 million minutes of dialog, in accordance with a brand new put up by Sesame investor Sequoia about its participation within the startup’s Sequence B.
“[T]he expertise was in contrast to something we’d used earlier than. Sesame’s conversational layer felt completely different,” the put up states. “It doesn’t simply translate LLM output into audio — it generates speech instantly, capturing the rhythm, emotion, and expressiveness of actual dialogue.”
Early critiques of the tech demo appear to agree, as one report by The Verge described Sesame as “genuinely enjoyable” and “natural-sounding.”
Sesame says its upcoming glasses will supply “high-quality audio” and entry to an AI companion that can “observe the world alongside you.”
Sequoia additionally famous the smartglasses Sesame is constructing might be fashion-forward, in order that they seem like one thing you’d select to put on even when they didn’t supply built-in AI expertise. A timeframe for his or her availability isn’t but being shared — as Sequoia famous, “{hardware} takes time.”
On that entrance, Sesame might have a bonus. Its founding group additionally consists of Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell as its chief product officer, former Oculus COO and Fitbit exec Hans Hartmann as COO, former Oculus engineer supervisor and Actuality Labs engineering director Ryan Brown, and longtime Fb and Meta exec Angela Gayles.
Along with sharing the information of its Sequence B, Iribe introduced on X that Sesame is now opening an early beta of the Sesame iOS app. The app expertise will enable testers to get hands-on with the AI expertise being constructed, because the app could have the flexibility to “search, textual content and suppose,” he says.
Beta testers are requested to maintain their testing experiences confidential in the interim, which incorporates not discussing options or outcomes past the official beta check boards.
Traders within the Sesame Sequence B embody Sequoia, Spark, and different undisclosed backers, in accordance with Iribe.




