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Sesame Raises $250 Million and Opens Confidential iOS Beta for Its Conversational AI

Testers are using the voice-first agent in an app under nondisclosure, with the smartglasses still without a release date.

Overview

  • The Series B was announced on Tuesday with backing from Sequoia and Spark, alongside other undisclosed investors.
  • A selective early beta of the Sesame iOS app is live, offering testers the ability to search, text and think, with discussions limited to official beta forums.
  • Sesame plans to embed its conversational agent in lightweight, fashion-forward glasses, though the company has not shared a hardware availability timeline.
  • Early public demos of the AI voices Maya and Miles drew more than one million users who generated over five million minutes of conversation, according to Sequoia.
  • The startup is led by Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe and former Ubiquity6 CTO Ankit Kumar, with veterans from Oculus and Meta in key product and operations roles.