The Company Predicting Whether You Will Return Something | Seel on Lightwork

Zack Peng, co-founder and CEO of Seel, joins Lightwork to explain why he treated e-commerce returns as an underwriting problem rather than a logistics one. He was a philosophy and physics major who learned to code at Orbital Insight, where he watched algorithms predict events for hedge funds and insurers, and noticed that payment chargebacks drew heavy investment despite representing under 1% of GMV while returns ran 15 to 25%. Seel started by predicting returns from pre-purchase behavior using roughly 200 signals, including one Zack still finds surprising, which is whether a product photo uses a human model. The conversation gets into the choice to sell the liability rather than the signals, and a go-to-market that is free for brands and paid by shoppers at checkout, where an insurance-backed refund policy sits alongside features like 24/7 support and one-click resale through an agent that lists an item across seven marketplaces. Zack explains why Seel builds agencies rather than agents, arguing that an agency owns the outcome while a product can always blame the user, and why he thinks that accountability gap is what leaves many agentic support tools short of full resolution. He closes on where agentic commerce leaves the shopper, the consumer app Seel built around that, and why he expects a one-person billion dollar brand to stop sounding far-fetched. Chapters: 0:00 Welcome, Zack Peng! 1:45 What Does Seel Do for E-Commerce? 4:21 How Zack Peng Went From Satellites to E-Commerce 6:07 How Does Seel Predict Returns? 7:25 How Seel’s Return Prediction Model Became Profitable 9:05 What Did Seel Learn From Smaller Brands? 11:17 How Does Seel’s Business Model Work? 14:52 Who Is Accountable When Things Wrong? 17:28 Where Does Seel Draw the Line on AI Operations? 18:21 How Will Agentic Commerce Change E-Commerce? 20:07 How Will AI Change the Consumer Shopping Experience? 22:21 The Future of Seel 24:57 Closing Thoughts