What if your glasses could remember everything, translate any language, and answer every question in real time?
That’s the bet founder Brendan Iribe is making.
And it all started at Oculus, where he teamed up with Palmer Luckey on Oculus VR, the 2012 Kickstarter-backed project that has gone on to redefine virtual reality.
Two years after its creation, Facebook acquired Oculus for $2 billion, and suddenly Iribe found himself at the beginning of a new frontier of technology. The billion dollar sale cemented his status as one of Silicon Valley’s breakout founders, but it also left him wanting more. “Once you’ve built a new reality,” he’d later reflect, “you start wondering what’s next.”
On October 22, 2018, after six intense years, Iribe announced his departure from Facebook, calling it “the first real break I’ve taken in over 20 years.”
But that break didn’t last long.
After meeting his now co-founder Ankit Kumar, a Stanford engineer turned AI researcher with experience at Discord, they quickly bonded over their shared belief that the next generation of computers should live not on screens, but beyond them.
Together, they got to work, founding Sesame, a voice-first AI platform now backed by $250 million from Sequoia and Spark Capital.
Its mission? Power lightweight smart glasses with an always-on voice companion that observes, listens, and helps all day long. Since emerging from stealth, Sesame’s demo voices, Maya and Miles, have already drawn over a million users and logged five million minutes of conversation.
At Oculus, Iribe taught people to believe in what they couldn’t see. Now he’s doing it again.
Sesame’s glasses are rumoured for release in 2026, and are designed to feel less like tech and more like a physical companion guiding you through the world.
For a generation raised on voice assistants like Siri, Sesame isn’t competing in software; it’s competing to make AI wearable, hands-free, and ever-present.
