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

Etsy’s AI Architect Launches Sequen: The $16M Startup Poised to Replace Cookies with Real-Time Personalization

In a move that could revolutionize how businesses approach personalization, Zoë Weil—the former Etsy executive who helped drive a billion-dollar increase in gross merchandise volume through AI ranking systems—has launched Sequen, a startup promising to bring TikTok-level personalization to Fortune 500 companies without the privacy concerns of cookies.

Sequen just closed a $16 million Series A funding round co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures, bringing its total funding to $22 million. The company’s bold claim? It can deliver “crazy revenue lift” through real-time personalization technology that doesn’t rely on user identity or third-party cookies.

“We’re taking it a step further,” Weil explains. “Modern tech isn’t really recommending content anymore. It’s bending your will in subtle ways over time to make you actually want things.”

The technology behind Sequen’s promise is what Weil calls “large event models”—AI systems that generalize streams of events and human behavior rather than relying on static user profiles. While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT generalize text, these large event models generalize the patterns of human interaction in real-time.

This approach has already delivered impressive results. A major furniture company saw a 7% revenue lift after switching to Sequen, compared to their previous benchmark of 0.4% being considered a win. Fetch Rewards experienced a 20% lift in net revenue in just 11 days. The company is also working with clients in streaming media and online travel.

Sequen’s platform, RankTune, integrates with businesses through APIs, allowing companies to swap out their existing relevance stack for Sequen’s technology. The system processes some 10 billion monthly requests and makes decisions in under 20 milliseconds—fast enough for real-time applications.

What sets Sequen apart is its privacy-forward approach. Unlike cookie-based tracking that follows users across the web, Sequen’s technology learns from live user actions—clicks, scrolls, hovers, conversations—within a given session without needing to identify who the user is.

“Our large event models are able to generalize to streams of real-time events that they get,” Weil says. “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.”

This could position Sequen as a potential replacement for the cookie, which has faced increasing regulatory scrutiny and user privacy concerns. As privacy regulations like GDPR continue to evolve, businesses are seeking alternatives that can deliver personalization without the associated risks.

The pricing model is based on requests per second (RPS), with tiers offering up to 500 RPS or 1,000 RPS and beyond, with discounts as tiers increase. Among Sequen’s first five customers, contracts are already in the seven figures.

Weil isn’t alone in this venture. She’s joined by Ethan Benjamin, who worked with her at Etsy, and co-founders Mo Afshar and Alexander Thom. Raphael Louca, recently from Meta, serves as chief product officer. The 14-person team includes talent from DeepMind, Meta, Anthropic, and elsewhere, all based in New York.

In less than 18 months, Sequen has processed billions of requests and secured business with multiple Fortune 500 companies. The company’s offering includes proprietary technology such as large event models, ranking models, and algorithms developed in-house.

As businesses continue to grapple with the dual challenges of delivering personalized experiences and respecting user privacy, Sequen’s approach represents a compelling alternative. If successful, it could reshape how the world’s largest companies approach personalization—bringing the sophisticated recommendation systems of TikTok and Instagram to industries that have never had access to such technology.

The question now is whether Sequen can deliver on its promise at scale, and whether businesses will be willing to trust this new approach over the familiar (if problematic) cookie-based systems that have dominated the web for decades.

Tags: AI personalization, real-time ranking, large event models, cookie replacement, eCommerce AI, recommendation systems, privacy-first technology, Fortune 500 AI, Sequen, Zoë Weil, Etsy AI, TikTok algorithms, revenue optimization, machine learning infrastructure

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