Sequen snags $16M to bring TikTok-style personalization tech to any consumer company

At Etsy, Zoë Weil helped to drive a billion-dollar increase in gross merchandise volume within a single year by improving the online marketplace’s AI ranking systems. With her new startup, Sequen, she aims to bring her and her co-founders’ years of AI research and product development to other businesses in the consumer space.

The company, which just closed on $16 million in Series A funding, offers real-time personalization technology and ranking infrastructure — technology used by the world’s biggest tech firms, but which has been inaccessible to other large consumer businesses because of the massive datasets required.

While those outside the tech industry may not understand what this technology involves, anyone who’s used consumer apps like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube has been the target of these systems.

Explains Weil, Sequen CEO, “modern tech isn’t really recommending content anymore. It’s bending your will in subtle ways over time to make you actually want things. And, in fact, the tech has gotten so good that a lot of people suspect platforms are eavesdropping on their conversations,” she says.

Weil credits this phenomenon to something called the Large Event Model. While Large Language Models (LLMs) used by chatbots like ChatGPT generalize text, Large Event Models generalize streams of events and human behavior in particular. This technology has use cases that go beyond building a better algorithm.

Weil believes that Sequen could eventually replace the cookie — a tracking technology that personalizes web experiences for end users, but in a way that has raised privacy concerns and triggered regulation.

“Our large event models learn from live user actions, not just clicks and scrolls, but also hovers, conversations and stuff within a given session — not static profiles or third-party cookies,” Weil says. “That’s how you personalize in real-time, even with sparse data. So yes, we do unlock TikTok’s algorithms for Fortune 500 companies that don’t have the infrastructure to do it…but I would say we’re taking it a step further,” she adds.

Businesses who work with Sequen integrate with the startup’s RankTune platform, which allows them to access Sequent’s frontier ranking models and real-time ranking models through APIs. What’s more, Sequen’s technology is not as privacy-invasive as the cookie because it’s based on real-time data — the user’s identity is not needed to personalize the results. And it’s fast with sub-20 milliseconds decision making.

Despite this more privacy-forward aspect, Sequen says its technology can still demonstrate “crazy revenue lift.” In one example, a large furniture company saw a 7% revenue lift after switching to Sequen. Another customer, Fetch Rewards, saw a 20% lift on net revenue in just under 11 days.

The system is priced based on requests per second (RPS). Among its first five customers, contracts are in the seven figures. Now, in under 18 months, the company has processed some 10 billion monthly requests and won business at a handful of Fortune 500 companies.

At the startup, Weil is joined by a team of fourteen including those from DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, and elsewhere. Sequen’s Series A was co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures. To date, Sequen has raised $22 million.