What Sesame does
Sesame is a frontier AI lab building lifelike voice companions and the wearable form-factor that surrounds them. Where most voice products today still feel like robotic narrators with a polite tone, Sesame's research focus is to make voice AI sound emotionally present — capable of pacing, pausing, breathing, and reacting like a person would in a real conversation. The company's research is driven by its proprietary Conversational Speech Model (CSM), a generative voice model trained for prosody, expression, and turn-taking, which Sesame partially open-sourced in 2025 to seed an ecosystem of voice-native applications.
Sesame's first publicly playable products are the voice companions Maya and Miles, which more than a million people accessed within weeks of release in early 2025, generating over five million minutes of conversation. In October 2025 the company opened a public beta of its companion app and confirmed it is building a category of AI smart glasses designed around audio — using voice rather than displays as the primary interface.
Who it's for
Sesame's near-term audience is consumers who want a personal, voice-first AI companion they can talk to throughout the day; the longer-term audience is developers, hardware platforms, and creative teams who want an emotionally rich speech stack for their own products. The smart-glasses program targets early adopters who are already comfortable wearing AR-adjacent hardware.
Pricing
Sesame's voice companion app currently runs on a free public beta with usage limits, while Sesame has signaled future paid tiers tied to its glasses hardware and developer access to CSM-derived APIs. Pricing details for hardware and enterprise voice are not yet public.
Team & funding
Sesame was founded in 2023 by Brendan Iribe (co-founder & CEO, former Oculus co-founder and CEO), Ankit Kumar (co-founder, former CTO of AR startup Ubiquity6), and Nate Mitchell (co-founder & CPO, also Oculus alum). Sesame raised a $10.1M seed in September 2023, a $47.5M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in November 2023 with Spark, Matrix and BIG Ventures, and a $250M Series B announced October 21, 2025, led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital. Cumulative funding sits at roughly $307M, and the company is widely cited as one of the leading voice-AI bets of the 2025-26 cycle.
Position vs competitors
Sesame competes with ElevenLabs, Cartesia, Hume, OpenAI's voice mode, and Character.ai on emotional voice quality, but is unusual in pursuing both the model layer and a dedicated wearable form factor — closer in ambition to Apple-style integrated stack plays than to pure model APIs.