Albatross, a Zurich-based AI company founded by former Amazon AI leaders, has raised $12.5 million to develop what it says is the world’s first platform for real-time product and content discovery – one that learns, reasons, and adapts as users interact.
The round was led by MMC Ventures with participation from Redalpine, Daphni, and strategic angels, bringing Albatross’s total funding to $16 million, following a $3.5 million foundation round in September 2024 led by Redalpine. The company’s platform is already serving billions of live events and tens of millions of predictions each month across marketplaces, retail, and travel platforms worldwide, processing approximately 100,000,000 products and tens of millions of end users.
Founded in 2024 by Dr. Kevin Kahn and Dr. Matteo Ruffini, alongside serial entrepreneur Johan Boissard, Albatross is tackling what the team sees as a fundamental gap in the AI revolution. While much of the industry focuses on large language models that generate content, Albatross is building the second pillar of AI: understanding how users perceive and interact with content in real time. It is built on a transformer-based architecture with sequential embedding models trained directly on live events.
Traditional recommendation systems look backward, using batch-trained models that rely on popularity, similarity, or user history. Albatross believes those approaches struggle to capture what really matters: what a person is doing right now. In contrast, Albatross replaces these legacy systems with AI that learns continuously from live behavior, updating in milliseconds as users browse, search, and explore without any manual intervention or retraining.
“Our mission is to close the discovery gap,” said Kahn. “Everyone has felt the frustration of seeing the same generic recommendations over and over. Our system perceives and adapts instantly, so every search and feed reflects the user’s intent at that very moment. From our conversations with a broad range of CEOs, we know they all want to adopt AI, but most efforts fail because they treat it as an add-on.
“The real opportunity is to rethink how experiences are shaped — to make every interaction intelligent, adaptive, and alive. That’s what Albatross does: it learns and reasons in real time, understanding intent the moment it happens.”
Albatross’s two flagship products are the Real-Time Discovery Feed and Multimodal Search. The Discovery Feed dynamically curates inspiring products and content in real time, while the Multimodal Search engine refines results based on evolving intent, even bridging in-store and online journeys through contextual and image input. The platform operates with enterprise-grade reliability at virtually zero latency.
Early pilots have shown triple-digit uplifts in engagement and product discovery. Integration takes less than seven weeks from signature to deployment, and the platform operates with enterprise-grade reliability, handling billions of data points. The company’s research on cold-start discovery, presented at RecSys 2025, now powers its production platform at scale.
“Personalization is entering a new era,” said Mina Samaan, general partner at MMC Ventures. “Albatross moves beyond static algorithms to build systems that understand context as it happens. Their real-time architecture represents a step change for how businesses engage customers online.”
Redalpine, which led Albatross’s foundation round in 2024, increased its investment.
“We backed Albatross from the very beginning because of the team’s exceptional depth in AI and personalization,” said Dr. Marc Moesser, investor at Redalpine. “In just a year, they’ve gone beyond what even the largest platforms achieve with real-time infrastructure that adapts instantly to user behavior.”