White Star Capital

Sequen Secures $16M for TikTok-Style Personalization Tech

Sequen, a New York startup founded by Zoë Weil and colleagues, closed a $16 million Series A to commercialize real-time personalization and ranking infrastructure for consumer businesses. The company offers its RankTune platform—APIs that expose large-event and real-time ranking models—to enable TikTok-style relevance without requiring massive proprietary datasets or user identities. Sequen says its models make sub-20-millisecond decisions, have processed about 10 billion monthly requests, and delivered measurable revenue lifts for customers (examples include a furniture retailer and Fetch Rewards). The round was co-led by White Star Capital and Threshold Ventures; Sequen has raised $22 million to date and has a 14-person team including hires from Meta, DeepMind and Anthropic.

Get Your Display Graphs; Resonate Gets Funds For Big Data Tool; Facebook Premium Ads

AdExchanger's Thursday news roundup covers notable AdTech movements across funding, product updates, and acquisitions. Resonate raises $20 million led by Revolution Growth, with Ted Leonsis joining its board, as it pivots toward values marketing and a big data tool for political campaigns and corporate marketers. Facebook unveils Premium Ads with larger images and cites 40–80% performance improvements. eBay acquires WHI, a provider of auto parts software and digital catalogs. Google AdSense teams explore publisher recommendations derived from ad-auction simulations, potentially via an API. The piece also notes Raj Wilson discussing aiMatch and the Three C's, plus various related industry items such as local data partnerships and other executive moves.