The first time you really understand what Open Sesame Media is building, it is not in a pitch deck. It is in the demo Verizon ran at AWS re:Invent 2023, where musicians in different physical locations played together over a 5G network and the timing actually held [Verizon, 2023]. Anyone who has ever tried to jam over Zoom knows the small, soul-killing lag that turns a downbeat into a debate. Watching that lag disappear is the kind of product moment that makes a category feel possible.
That moment is the wedge for Open Sesame Media, the Marina del Rey company founded in 2019 by Julian McCrea and Steve Lyons [Tracxn]. Its product, SyncStage, is a B2B audio pipeline that app developers can plug into to deliver low-latency, synchronized sound between users [LinkedIn]. The pitch is not another consumer social-audio app. It is the infrastructure underneath one: the part that makes a remote choir, a co-op rhythm game, a distributed podcast studio, or a telepresence classroom feel like the participants are in the same room. SyncStage is patent-pending, and the SYNCSTAGE wordmark was registered with the USPTO in October 2023 under serial number 97260038 [Furm, 2023].
The bet
Open Sesame Media's wager is that the bottleneck for a generation of social, musical, and collaborative apps is not interface design or AI. It is physics, specifically the round-trip time between two humans trying to feel synchronized. The company's answer routes audio through edge infrastructure, partnering with AWS Wavelength and using telecom Quality of Service APIs to shorten that trip [AWS Marketplace]. A company blog post on the AWS Industries channel describes the architecture as a multi-edge audio sync layer riding on carrier network APIs [AWS Blog]. In plain terms: instead of hauling every packet back to a distant data center, SyncStage tries to keep the audio close to the cell tower, which is where the milliseconds live or die.
The go-to-market is developer-facing. SyncStage is listed on AWS Marketplace as a tool MainStage users and other application builders can adopt [AWS Marketplace]. That distribution path matters: it puts the product in front of the exact buyer who has spent a weekend trying to glue together WebRTC and given up.
Why it could be big
The tailwinds here are unusually concrete. Carrier 5G deployments have produced edge compute footprints (AWS Wavelength chief among them) that did not exist when latency-sensitive audio was last attempted at scale. The AWS re:Invent demonstration with Verizon was not a press-release flourish; it was a working session that put SyncStage in front of the cloud and telecom buyers most likely to embed it [Verizon, 2023]. Selection as a Top 8 finalist in the HARMAN-XTC Startup Challenge at the 2022 HARMAN Tech Forum, focused specifically on the commercialization of an ultra-low latency audio platform, signals that the audio industry itself sees the technical claim as credible [LinkedIn, 2022].
The addressable surface is broad. Music collaboration is the lighthouse use case, but anything that benefits from sub-perceptual audio sync (live esports voice, language tutoring, theater rehearsal, broadcast remote production, fitness instruction) sits in the same neighborhood. If SyncStage becomes the default way developers ship synchronized audio, the company sells picks and shovels to whichever consumer trend wins.
The team and traction
McCrea and Lyons, who serves as COO and co-founder [RocketReach], have built the company out of the USC Viterbi Startup Garage, with backing from Quake Capital Partners, Fuel, EvoNexus, and Emerging Ventures [Tracxn, Jan 2023]. The team's background reaches into Sony, Nintendo, Sony Pictures, Disneyland, and the BBC, according to the company's Built In Los Angeles profile [Built In Los Angeles]. That is an unusual blend of console gaming, theme park live experience, and broadcast operations, all industries that take audio timing seriously as a craft, not a feature.
The company has also planted a European flag, registering Open Sesame Media GmbH in Cologne, Germany under HRB 103429 [Northdata], with the move framed as launching European business operations to take SyncStage to markets outside the United States [NRW.Global Business]. Cologne is a sensible choice: it sits near both German broadcast infrastructure and a dense cluster of music-tech companies.
| Milestone | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Company founded | 2019 | Tracxn |
| HARMAN-XTC Top 8 finalist | 2022 | |
| SYNCSTAGE trademark registered (USPTO 97260038) | 2023 | Furm |
| Verizon and AWS re:Invent live music demo | 2023 | Verizon |
| Funding round (amount undisclosed) | 2023 | Tracxn |
The honest counterfactual
What bears will say is that low-latency audio is a crowded technical problem, with Elk Audio, SonoBus, and JackTrip all chasing variants of the same goal, and that a B2B platform business needs a high-volume developer pipeline to justify the infrastructure spend. The bull answer is that none of those competitors have publicly demonstrated the same combination of carrier-edge integration and cloud marketplace distribution that Open Sesame showed with Verizon and AWS in 2023 [Verizon, 2023] [AWS Marketplace]. Riding the carriers' own edge infrastructure is a defensible position if SyncStage becomes the reference implementation that telecoms point developers toward, and the company's USPTO trademark and patent-pending status on the underlying platform suggest the founders are building with that defensibility in mind [Furm, 2023] [AWS Blog].
What to watch
The next twelve months are about converting demos into deployments. The signals to track are whether a named consumer app ships on SyncStage, whether the Cologne entity announces a European carrier partnership analogous to the Verizon relationship, and whether the company moves from its 2023 seed round into a priced Series A that would put real capital behind the developer go-to-market [Tracxn, Jan 2023]. The HARMAN connection is also worth watching, given that audio hardware OEMs are the natural distribution partners for an SDK like this one [LinkedIn, 2022].
The cultural question SyncStage is implicitly answering is the one every video call has been quietly asking for five years: when two people are not in the same room, what would it take for them to actually be playing the same song?