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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 participat
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