Sesame

Sesame is a technology startup dedicated to the development of voice assistants and related hardware, led by Brendan Iribe, Ankit Kumar and Ryan Brown. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Bellevue and New York. Sesame's team members have accumulated deep industry experience in the fields of machine learning, hardware, software and entertainment, and firmly believe that small, capable and goal-oriented teams can create transformative technology products.

Core team and leadership background

Sesame’s leadership team brings together senior experts from the technology industry, especially with rich experience in the fields of virtual reality, artificial intelligence and voice interaction:

Brendan Iribe is one of the co-founders of Sesame and an important figure in the technology industry. He is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of Oculus VR, a virtual reality company that was acquired by Facebook (now Meta) in 2014 and laid the foundation for the growth of the VR field. Iribe has extensive experience in the development of hardware, software and computing platforms, and his addition indicates that Sesame may be building innovative products that integrate hardware and AI.

Ankit Kumar, as co-founder, has a strong background in machine learning and artificial intelligence. He has played a core role in several high-tech projects and is committed to promoting the development of AI technology to make it more intelligent and efficient.

Ryan Brown is also one of Sesame's core leaders. He has extensive experience in product design, user experience and engineering management, and drives Sesame's development in product R&D and market positioning.

Product and technical direction

Sesame is developing voice assistants capable of natural conversations, as well as hardware devices that enhance the capabilities of voice assistants.

As a form of interaction, voice is intuitive and personalized, but to achieve a truly efficient and non-irritating experience, many technical challenges need to be overcome. Sesame focuses on how to make voice assistants adapt to user needs more naturally and intelligently, avoiding a mechanical or unsmooth interaction experience.

Sesame uses an interdisciplinary integration approach to deeply integrate hardware, software and machine learning to enhance the intelligence level of the voice assistant and make it more in line with user needs, rather than just a simple voice control tool.

On March 13, 2025, the company open sourced its first large model CSM-1B, which received widespread attention.

Cutting-edge research and technological breakthroughs

Sesame conducts in-depth research in speech generation, personalized modeling and multi-modal interaction to promote breakthroughs in speech technology:

Speech Generation: Improve the naturalness of voice assistants, making their voices closer to real people.

Personality Modeling: Using AI to give voice assistants a more anthropomorphic interaction style to improve user experience.

Multimodality: Combining multiple input methods such as voice and vision to make the interaction between people and devices smoother and more intuitive.

Sesame has also established a large-scale GPU computing cluster and an independent data training and evaluation system to support the training and optimization of large-scale machine learning models, ensuring that research results can be quickly applied to actual products.

Capital support and industry recognition

Sesame has received support from a number of well-known venture capital institutions, including:

Andreessen Horowitz (representing investors: Anjney Midha and Marc Andreessen) - The company is known for investing in transformative technology companies. As a co-founder, Marc Andreessen developed the Mosaic browser and founded Netscape, which has a profound influence on the Internet industry.

Spark Capital – a venture capital firm known for backing innovative start-ups.

Matrix Partners - specializes in investing in high-growth technology companies and has supported many successful technology companies.

and a group of experienced entrepreneurs and investors, further enhancing Sesame’s industry influence.

Summary

Sesame is a technology company focusing on voice interaction technology. Its goal is to create a smarter and more natural voice assistant through the deep integration of hardware, software and AI. The company is led by Oculus VR co-founder Brendan Iribe. The team members have extensive experience in the fields of machine learning, hardware, software and entertainment, and are supported by top venture capital investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Matrix Partners.

Although Sesame has not announced the market application of specific products, its technical research direction and team background indicate that the company is committed to promoting changes in voice interaction technology and is expected to change the way people interact with smart devices in the future.