Sesame is a conversational AI company and smart glasses maker. The company announced on Tuesday that it has raised $250 million in a Series B round of funding and will be opening its beta to select testers.
The company, led by former Oculus CEO and co-founder Andrew Palmer, has raised $250 million in a Series B round. It is now opening its beta to a select group of testers. Brendan Iribe (19459050) and Ankit Kumar (19459050), former CTO of AR startup Ubiquity6, has been working on creating a personal AI agent which interacts with users by using a human-sounding voice. The company plans to embed a personal AI agent in lightweight eyewear designed to be worn all day long and that users can communicate with via voice.
This startup is the first to introduce voice-activated AI. In February, the company emerged from stealth and offered two demos of their technology – AI voices named “Maya”and “Miles”. More than a thousand people accessed these voices within a few weeks, generating more than 5,000,000 minutes of conversation. Postfrom Sesame’s investor Sequoia regarding its participation in the startup’s Series B.
[T]The experience was unlike anything else we’d ever used before. The post says that Sesame’s conversational layer “felt different.” It doesn’t simply translate LLM output to audio — it creates speech directly. It captures the rhythm, emotion and expressiveness of a real dialogue. The Verge described Sesame
as “genuinely fun”
Sequoia noted that the smartglasses Sesame will build are fashion-forward and look like something one would choose to wear, even if it didn’t have built-in AI. Sequoia has not shared a timeframe for the smartglasses’ availability. “Hardware takes time,” they said.
Sesame could have an edge on this front. Sesame’s founding team includes Oculus cofounder Nate Mitchell has been appointed as its Chief Product Officer, with former Oculus COO Hans Hartmann, former Fitbit executive and Reality Labs engineering manager, and former Oculus engineer manager. Ryan Brown is a long-time Facebook and Meta executive Angela Gayles .
Iribe, in addition to sharing news of its Series B. Sesame has announcedthat it is opening an early beta version of the Sesame iOS App. The app experience allows testers to interact with the AI technology that is being developed, as it will be able to “search, think and text,” he says.
The beta testers have been asked to keep their experiences confidential For the time beingwe will not discuss features or results outside of the official beta test forums.
Investors include Sequoia and Spark, as well as other unnamed backers. Iribe says.
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