Sesame Gets $250 Million to Build Your Personal AI Assistant

A startup called Sesame has just raised $250 million in funding to develop personal AI assistants that talk to you like a human would. The company launched in February 2025 and has now released an app for iPhones, starting with a limited number of users.

Sesame was founded by Brendan Iribe, who co-founded Oculus (later bought by Meta), and Ankit Kumar, a technology executive from an earlier augmented reality company. Their goal is to create AI personalities you can have real conversations with—eventually not just on your phone, but through smart glasses too.

Early Signs of Real Use

Since Sesame released early voice demos of two AI personalities—Maya and Miles—over one million people tried them out. People spent more than 5 million minutes talking to these AI assistants. That's a good sign that people weren't just curious for a few minutes; they actually wanted to have extended conversations.

The new iPhone app is now available to download. Sesame emphasizes that its AI responds quickly when you talk to it. With most AI chatbots today, there's often an awkward pause before they answer. Sesame has designed its system to feel more natural by cutting down that delay.

Memory That Lasts

Here's what makes Sesame different from ChatGPT or other AI chatbots: each AI personality remembers what you've talked about before and learns who you are over time. Think of it like talking to a friend who knows your history, not a stranger who starts fresh every conversation.

Sesame also offers an "Incognito mode" where your conversations are not saved. This addresses a real concern for many people: if an AI remembers everything, what happens to my privacy? The app lets you choose.

Plans for Smart Glasses

Beyond an iPhone app, Sesame is building smart glasses that would let you talk to your AI assistant directly from your face. This fits with Iribe's background building VR headsets. The idea is to move beyond phones toward wearable devices where AI is built in from the start.

Other companies are working on similar products—Meta has Ray-Ban smart glasses, for example—so this is becoming a crowded space. The challenge for any company building smart glasses is tough: they need to be light, last a long time on battery, sound good, and not look strange when you wear them in public.

What This Means in Broader Context

There's a pattern worth noting here. In the past, companies started with software on phones and then moved into hardware. We saw this happen with Palm and later with the iPhone. When voice and AI become central to how people interact with technology, companies naturally try to build the devices to match. The question for Sesame is whether it can do both well at the same time.

The Money and the Competition

Sequoia Capital led this funding round, which is significant because venture capital has been pickier in recent years. The size of this investment—$250 million—signals that investors think Sesame has serious ambitions. Apple, Google, and Amazon all have voice assistant products, and newer companies like Character.AI and Replika also exist. Sesame's bet is that users will prefer AI assistants that feel more like personal friends than tools.

In my view, Sesame's experienced leadership and substantial funding give it a real shot at competing with the big tech companies. But the company will need to prove its AI actually sounds and feels better than existing options. The next year and a half will show whether the millions of people who tried those early demos stick around for the long term. True success likely depends on whether Sesame can make AI that feels genuinely useful as an ongoing relationship—not just a clever chatbot.