Sesame AI, a startup founded in June 2023 by former Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe, has secured $250 million in a Series B funding round. The investment was co-led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital. Iribe serves as CEO, with Ankit Kumar as CTO and Ryan Brown as a founding engineer. The team aims to utilize its collective background in AI, speech technology, and consumer hardware to develop its voice assistant technology.
The company is developing smart glasses integrated with advanced conversational AI. Its AI-powered voices, named “Maya” and “Miles,” are designed to capture the naturalism, rhythm, and emotional expression of human dialogue. Following significant public interest from an early demo, Sesame has launched a beta version of its smart glasses. The demo was accessed by more than one million people, who engaged in over five million minutes of conversation with the AI.
Sesame has also released its base AI model, CSM-1B, which powers the “Maya” assistant. The 1-billion-parameter model is available for commercial use under an Apache 2.0 license, which permits broad application with few restrictions. The company is positioning its product as a lightweight, user-friendly device focused on natural speech interaction. This approach is intended to differentiate its smart glasses from the more expensive and bulky VR headsets offered by competitors like Meta and Apple.
