Sequen raises $16M to bring TikTok-style personalization to consumer companies

Zoë Weil, who helped boost Etsy’s gross merchandise volume by a billion dollars in a year through improved AI ranking, has launched Sequen to offer real-time personalization and ranking infrastructure to consumer businesses. The startup closed a $16 million Series A and aims to deliver the kinds of models used by major tech platforms to companies that lack the massive datasets and infrastructure.

Sequen’s core is its large event models, which Weil contrasts with LLMs: large language models generalize text, while large event models generalize streams of events and human behavior. “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. The models learn from live user actions — clicks, hovers, conversations and session activity — and make sub-20-millisecond decisions without relying on user identity.

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