Euler's Identity for the Internet

I’m excited to announce Sequen’s $90 million Series B today, alongside Recursive Ranking Intelligence, our newest technology breakthrough. The round was led by Prysm Capital, with participation from Threshold Ventures and White Star Capital. I want to explain why anyone would put that kind of money into a company that only does ranking, and the explanation starts with an equation.

As a kid, I was obsessed with Euler's identity, e^(iπ) + 1 = 0. The number behind compound growth, the number behind circles, the square root of negative one, and then one and zero: five things from unrelated corners of mathematics, found centuries apart by people who had no idea the others existed, and they turn out to be in a single sentence. What I loved was that nobody designed it. It was true the whole time, underneath everything, waiting for someone to look from the right angle.

I assumed I'd spend my life as a mathematician chasing hidden truths like that. Then I understood I was never going to be a great mathematician; math is a young person's game, and mine was behind me before it started. Like many failed mathematicians, I ended up in the computer science department, and that's where I found the thing I'm actually good at: information retrieval, getting a person to what they're looking for.

Except the part that gripped me wasn't helping people find things. It was that the instant someone searches, you can influence what they think they are looking for.

This was 2010, 2011, before "the algorithm" was a phrase anyone said out loud. Ranking decides which questions get asked at all: what appears first, what appears next, what you never see.

Once you've internalized this, you see it everywhere. Every search result, every ad, everything you buy, every piece of content you read, every price you're quoted, all of it runs on a ranking system. None of it is neutral and none of it is accidental. Somewhere there is a model deciding the order, and the order is the entire game. It isn't only what you see next. It's what you see first. It's what you see last. It's what you never see.

That's the identity I'd been looking for since I was a kid. A hotel search, a pair of pants, a news feed, and an ad auction look like four industries with nothing in common, and underneath they are one function with different inputs, the way growth and circles and an impossible number are one equation. Ranking is Euler's identity for the internet: the short line under everything, that almost nobody looks at directly, and that turns out to be where the money moves.

Every dollar of online consumer spend passes through a ranking model on its way out of someone's wallet, and most of the companies whose revenue depends on that model don't own it. Social platforms do, because they have the dense, constant-use data that makes ranking tractable. Retailers, travel companies, and marketplaces mostly don't, and for them it has been an incredibly hard problem to solve. So we built an AI researcher that works non-stop generating ranking models proven to make money, measured as statistically significant lift in live A/B tests on the customer's own instrumentation, and the customer owns every model it creates.

— Zoe Weil

Cofounder & CEO