Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell announced he’s joining former CEO Brendan Iribe and hardware architect Ryan Brown at Sesame, the smart glasses startup that exited stealth earlier this year.
Mitchell announced in a LinkedIn post that he’s joining Sesame as Chief Product Officer, noting his mission is to “help bring computers to life.”
“Getting the band back together with Brendan Iribe, Ryan Brown, and many of the original Oculus crew. Building the future together again,” Mitchell says in the post.
Sesame is currently working on an AI assistant along with a pair of lightweight smart glasses, which the company says is “[d]esigned to be worn all day, giving you high-quality audio and convenient access to your companion who can observe the world alongside you.”
Mitchell, who co-founded Oculus along with Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, and Michael Antonov in 2012, served as VP of Product for a number of years, later leading Rift and Meta’s (ex-Facebook’s) broader VR product strategy. Mitchell departed the company in 2019 as the last remaining founder.
In 2020, Mitchell announced he was founding Mountaintop Studios and leading the company as CEO. The studio went on to release free-to-play tactical shooter Spectre Divide (2024) on PC and console, however within six months of release, the studio announced it would be shuttering the studio and taking Spectre Divide offline following tepid response to the game’s first big DLC drop, ‘Season 1: Flashpoint’.
Founded in 2023, Sesame is backed by a number of former Oculus investors, including Anjney Midha and Marc Andreessen at Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Matrix Partners.
The company completed its most recent Series A funding round in November 2023 to the tune of $47.5 million, making for a total of $57,624,975 invested in the company to date, according to data obtained by Crunchbase.
