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

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 that 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 that work with Sequen integrate with the startup’s RankTune platform, which allows them to access Sequen’s frontier ranking models and real-time ranking models through APIs. (Sequen’s customers are already using some kind of in-house API to power their relevance stack, so they just swap out their API for Sequen’s.)

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-millisecond decision-making.

“Our large event models are able to generalize to streams of real-time events that they get,” says Weil. “It doesn’t matter who is performing those events — they’re able to understand events and be able to make sense of them without relying on the user’s identity. So actually, the user’s identity is completely irrelevant.”

Despite this more privacy-forward aspect, Sequen says its technology can still demonstrate “crazy revenue lift,” Weil claims.

In one example, a large furniture company saw a 7% revenue lift after switching to Sequen, when before, a 0.4% lift was considered a win. Another customer, Fetch Rewards, saw a 20% lift on net revenue in just under 11 days. It’s also working with a company in the streaming media space and an online travel agency.

The system is priced based on requests per second (RPS), with tiers offering up to 500 RPS or 1,000 RPS and so on, with pricing discounts as the tiers increase. Among its first five customers, contracts are in the seven figures.

“What we’ve seen consistently across the board is people opting for the highest tier, because as soon as they see us in one use case, they want to adopt us on their entire platform,” notes Weil.

Weil had started her career in this space on the research side of things, but quickly realized she’d rather build products. Most of her time to date has been spent helping companies develop these types of ranking products to generate business value from them, which is what led her to create Sequen.

Now, in under 18 months, the company has processed some 10 billion monthly requests and won business at a handful of Fortune 500 companies. Its offering includes proprietary technology, including large event models, ranking models, algorithms, and more.

At the startup, Weil is joined by Ethan Benjamin, who worked with her at Etsy, and co-founders Mo Afshar and Alexander Thom. Raphael Louca recently joined from Meta to become Sequen’s chief product officer. Based in New York, the company’s 14-person team includes those from DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, and elsewhere.

Sequen’s Series A was co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures, with participation from its prior investors, including Greycroft, which had led its seed round. To date, Sequen has raised $22 million.