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. This is 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. Sequen CEO Zoë Weil explains that modern tech isn’t really recommending content anymore. It is bending your will in subtle ways over time to make you actually want things. She notes that the tech has gotten so good that a lot of people suspect platforms are eavesdropping on their conversations.
Weil credits this phenomenon to something called the Large Event Model. While Large Language Models 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 but has raised privacy concerns and triggered regulation. She states that their large event models learn from live user actions, not just clicks and scrolls, but also hovers, conversations, and actions within a given session. They do not rely on static profiles or third-party cookies. That is how you personalize in real-time, even with sparse data. Sequen unlocks powerful algorithms for Fortune 500 companies that lack the infrastructure, and takes the concept a step further.
Businesses who 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. Customers already using an in-house API for their relevance stack simply swap it out for Sequen’s.
Sequen’s technology is not as privacy-invasive as the cookie because it is based on real-time data. The user’s identity is not needed to personalize the results. The system is fast, with sub-20 millisecond decision making. Weil explains that their large event models generalize streams of real-time events. It does not matter who is performing those events. The models understand and make sense of events without relying on the user’s identity, making the user’s identity completely irrelevant.
Despite this more privacy-forward aspect, Sequen says its technology can still demonstrate significant revenue lift. In one example, a large furniture company saw a 7% revenue lift after switching to Sequen, where previously a 0.4% lift was considered a win. Another customer, Fetch Rewards, saw a 20% lift on net revenue in just under 11 days. Sequen is also working with a company in the streaming media space and an online travel agency.
The system is priced based on requests per second, with tiers offering up to 500 RPS or 1,000 RPS and beyond, with pricing discounting as the tiers increase. Among its first five customers, contracts are in the seven figures. Weil notes that customers consistently opt for the highest tier, because as soon as they see results in one use case, they want to adopt the technology across their entire platform.
Weil started her career on the research side but quickly realized she preferred building products. Most of her time has been spent helping companies develop ranking products to generate business value, which 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, and algorithms.
At the startup, Weil is joined by Ethan Benjamin, who worked with her at Etsy, and co-founders Mo Afsharr and Alexander Thom. Raphael Louca recently joined from Meta to become Sequen’s Chief Product Officer. Based in New York, its fourteen-person team includes talent from DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, and elsewhere.
Sequen’s Series A was co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures, with participation from prior investors including Greycroft, which had led its seed round. To date, Sequen has raised $22 million.