The voice-native conversational AI — natural, emotional, on-device glasses
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2023 | Employees: 40–80 (est. 2026) | Stage: Series B ($250M, Oct 2025) | Website: https://www.sesame.com
Sesame AI (often Sesame, sesame.com) was founded in June 2023 in San Francisco by Brendan Iribe (CEO, co-founder of Oculus VR acquired by Facebook for $2B in 2014) with co-founders Ankit Kumar and Ryan Brown (former DeepMind/Google research leaders on conversational AI and speech). Its mission is 'the most natural AI companion' — building full-duplex, emotionally resonant voice-native models (demo voices Maya and Miles) that handle turn-taking, interruption and affect natively rather than STT→LLM→TTS. The consumer surface is a voice companion app and, per late 2025 reveals, AI smart glasses — a vertical hardware bet akin to Oculus. It has raised $392M across six rounds per Tracxn/Startup Intros, including a $250M Series B in Oct 2025 co-led by Sequoia and Spark Capital with a16z participating (Pymnts, TechBuzz AI). Earlier Series A reports centered on ~$47.5M with talk of >$200M B in March 2025 (Bloomberg).
Sesame's thesis is that voice, not chat, is the agentic computer: a natural, emotional voice-native model (Maya/Miles) that feels like a person, not a tool — delivered through a companion app and eventually AI glasses. Founded Jun 2023 by Brendan Iribe (sold Oculus to Meta for $2B), plus ex-DeepMind/Google voice researchers Ankit Kumar and Ryan Brown, it raised quietly ($47.5M A rumors) then $250M Series B in Oct 2025 led by Sequoia and Spark Capital with a16z. With $392M across 6 rounds per Crunchbase/Tracxn, it trades stealth for a $1B+ hardware+model bet at the moment Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic all chase voice. The wager: that emotional voice quality is a moat before scale crushes it.
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