On Etsy, Zoë Weil helped achieve a billion dollar increase in gross merchandise volume in a single year by improving online marketplace AI ranking systems. With her new startup, Followingaims to bring her and her co-founders’ years of research and development of AI products to other businesses in the consumer space.
The company, which just closed $16 million in Series A funding, offers real-time personalization technology and ranking infrastructure — technology used by the world’s biggest tech companies but not accessible to other large consumer businesses because of the massive data sets required.
While those outside the tech industry may not understand what this technology entails, anyone who has used consumer apps like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube has become a target of these systems.
Explains Weil, CEO of Sequen, “Modern technology no longer constitutes content. Over time it bends your will in subtle ways to make you actually want things. And, in fact, the technology has gotten so good that many people suspect platforms are eavesdropping on their conversations,” he says.
Weil credits this phenomenon to something called the big event model. While large language models (LLMs) used by chatbots such as ChatGPT generalize text, large event models generalize streams of events and especially human behavior. This technology has use cases that go beyond creating a better algorithm.
Weil believes 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 enabled setting.
“Our big event models learn from live user actions, not just clicks and scrolls, but also hovers, conversations and more within a given session — not static profiles or third-party cookies,” says Weil. “That’s how you’re personalizing in real time, even with sparse data. So, yes, we’re unlocking TikTok’s algorithms for Fortune 500 companies that don’t have the infrastructure to do that… but I’d say we’re taking it a step further,” he adds.
Businesses working with Sequen integrate with the startup’s RankTune platform, which allows them to access Sequen’s frontier ranking models and real-time ranking models via API. (Sequen customers already use some kind of internal API to power their relevance stack, so they just exchange their API with Sequen.)
In addition, Sequen’s technology is not as privacy intrusive as a cookie because it is based on real-time data — the user’s identity is not necessary to personalize results. And it’s fast, with decisions made in under 20 milliseconds.
“Our large event models are able to generalize to streams of real-time events that they receive,” says Weil. “It doesn’t matter who is executing these events – they are able to understand the events and understand them without relying on the user’s identity. So, in effect, the user’s identity is completely irrelevant.”
Despite this privacy-promoting aspect, Sequen says its technology can still show “crazy revenue growth,” Weil claims.
In one example, a large furniture company saw a 7% increase in revenue after switching to Sequen, when before, a 0.4% increase was considered a profit. Another client, Fetch Rewards, saw a 20% increase in net revenue in less than 11 days. It also works with a streaming media company 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 price discounts as the tiers increase. Among its first five clients, contracts are in seven figures.
“What we’ve seen consistently across the board is that people choose the higher tier because once they see us in one use case, they want to adopt us across their entire platform,” notes Weil.
Weil had started her career in this space on the research side of things, but quickly realized she preferred making products. Most of her time to date has been spent helping companies develop these types of ranking products to create business value from them, which led her to create Sequen.
Now, in less than 18 months, the company has processed approximately 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 start, Weil is together Ethan Benjaminwho worked with her at Etsy and co-founded Mo Afsar 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 people from DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic and elsewhere.
Sequen’s Series A was co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures, with participation from its previous investors, including Greycroft, which led its first round. To date, Sequen has raised $22 million.
