Oculus Founders Are Back in Glasses: Sesame Sets 2027 for Its Handmade AI Eyewear

The people who sold the world on virtual reality are getting back into the glasses business, just not the kind you expected. Sesame, the AI startup led by former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe and Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell, announced this week that it plans to launch its own AI glasses in 2027. The device will not be another mass-market gadget chasing Meta's Ray-Ban playbook. According to a blog post by Mitchell, Sesame is building all-day glasses meant to sit alongside the best eyewear in the world, made in Japan, shaped and fitted by hand, with an assistant you actually enjoy talking to.

It is a deliberate contrarian bet in what has become the hottest form factor in consumer tech. While Meta, Google, and Samsung race to ship smart glasses at scale, the team that built the Rift is wagering that craftsmanship and voice quality can beat manufacturing muscle. The announcement comes as Sesame's conversational AI, the thing the glasses are really a vehicle for, takes a significant step toward becoming an agent that acts on your behalf rather than just a voice that talks back.

What Sesame announced

In the announcement blog post, Mitchell framed the project around a simple observation: intelligence still lives behind a screen, and to become present in daily life it needs hardware built around it. Eyewear, he argued, is the right form factor, because people already wear glasses all day, take pride in their favorite frames, and find voice a natural way to interact with them.

Details remain sparse, but a few concrete facts emerged. The glasses will be manufactured in Japan, and Sesame is explicitly targeting an audience that appreciates artisanal craftsmanship. Mitchell wrote that great frames are shaped, polished, and fitted by hand over days, adding that there are no shortcuts. No price, no display specifications, and no exact launch date were shared beyond the 2027 target. The positioning, as industry observers have noted, is less Ray-Ban and more Jaques Marie Mage: high-end, design-forward eyewear that feels closer to a collectible than to a consumer electronics device.

The band is getting back together

The Sesame leadership roster reads like an Oculus reunion. Iribe, who co-founded Oculus in 2012 and led it through its formative years and its acquisition by Meta (then Facebook) in 2014, serves as CEO. Mitchell, another co-founder who later led the Rift and Meta's broader VR product strategy before departing in 2019 as the last remaining founder, joined as chief product officer. They are joined by Ankit Kumar, former CTO of the AR startup Ubiquity6, hardware architect Ryan Brown, former Oculus COO and Fitbit executive Hans Hartmann running operations, and longtime Meta executive Angela Gayles.

The money behind the bet is substantial. Sesame completed a $47.5 million Series A in November 2023, and in October 2025 raised a $250 million Series B led by Sequoia and Spark Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz and Matrix Partners among the backers. Sesame emerged from stealth in February 2025 with two demo AI voices, named Maya and Miles, that generated speech directly rather than converting text to audio, capturing the rhythm and expressiveness of real dialogue. More than a million people tried the demos within weeks, generating over 5 million minutes of conversation, according to investor Sequoia.

While the industry races to ship smart glasses at scale, the team that built the Rift is wagering that craftsmanship and voice quality can beat manufacturing muscle.

From demo voices to agents that act

The glasses announcement landed alongside a major upgrade to the software that will power them. Sesame's AI agents, which have been in preview for a few months, now run on dedicated computers in the cloud instead of as a web demo, and they have gained the ability to access data from select Google apps and log into third-party websites. That is a meaningful shift: the product is moving from a conversational novelty toward an agent that can take action on a user's behalf.

The company has been building that bridge through its iOS app, launched in May 2026 in 39 countries and free for now, with a short waitlist at sign-up. Beta users got features including search cards with image results, notes for capturing takeaways, a texting mode for moments when speaking aloud is not an option, deep-dive research modes, and an incognito mode that grants agents access to prior context without saving anything to memory. The app is, in effect, the glasses' brain being trained in public before the hardware exists.

The anti-Ray-Ban strategy

The AI glasses market in 2026 is defined by one overwhelming fact: Meta owns it. The Ray-Ban Meta partnership turned smart glasses into a mainstream product category, and competitors from Snap to Google to Samsung have responded with their own scale plays. Sesame's answer is to refuse the comparison entirely. Instead of competing on distribution, price, or app ecosystems, it is competing on feel: the sound of the voice, the fit of the frame, the pleasure of wearing the thing.

There are real risks in that approach. Artisanal manufacturing does not scale the way injection-molded plastic does, and a premium price narrows the audience for a product whose core value, a great voice assistant, could theoretically run on anyone's hardware. Sesame has not confirmed whether the glasses will include a display, a camera, or both, describing them so far as lightweight eyewear with high-quality audio and access to a companion that observes the world alongside the wearer. Without more specifics, the 2027 glasses remain a promise attached to a genuinely impressive voice demo.

Perspective

Sesame's history gives the promise more weight than a typical startup pitch. Iribe and Mitchell have done this before: they helped create an entire hardware category from nothing, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, and watched it become the foundation of Meta's Reality Labs. Mitchell's subsequent venture, the game studio Mountaintop, closed after its shooter Spectre Divide failed to find an audience, a reminder that even proven founders can misfire. But the pattern at Sesame is familiar: identify the interaction layer that matters, in this case voice rather than pixels, and build hardware that disappears around it.

The open question is whether AI glasses follow the smartphone pattern, where scale and ecosystem crushed every craft-first challenger, or the watch pattern, where luxury and mass market coexist. Sesame is betting on the watch. If the assistant really does become something you enjoy talking to, and the frames really do earn a place on your face, the price may not matter. If not, 2027 will deliver the most beautiful pair of glasses nobody talks to. The voice demos suggest the team knows which half of that equation matters more.