Albatross raises 12.5 million USD for AI model that reinvents product discovery

Albatross, a Zurich-based AI company founded by former Amazon AI leaders, has successfully raised 12.5 million US dollars in new funding to develop an AI model for real-time product discovery. Designed to serve as a model that continuously learns from live consumer behaviour, the platform aims to replace static product recommendations. 

The funding round, led by MMC Ventures and including participation from Redalpine, Daphni, and strategic angels, brings Albatross’s total funding to 16 million USD, following a 3.5 million USD foundation round in September 2024 led by Redalpine. The AI platform currently processes billions of live events and tens of millions of predictions monthly across global marketplaces, retail, and travel sites, handling approximately 100 million products and tens of millions of users.

Founded in 2024 by former Amazon AI leaders Dr. Kevin Kahn and Dr. Matteo Ruffini, alongside serial entrepreneur Johan Boissard, Albatross addresses what the founders identify as a critical gap in AI development. While the industry emphasizes large language models for content generation, Albatross focuses on AI’s second pillar: real-time understanding of user perception and interaction. The technology uses a transformer-based architecture with sequentially embedded models trained on live events.

Conventional recommendation systems use batch-trained models based on popularity, similarity, or user history, failing to capture immediate user intent. Albatross replaces these systems with AI that learns continuously from live behavior, updating in milliseconds as users browse and search, without manual intervention or retraining. The platform is said to be the first to adapt instantly to shifting user behavior. 

“Our mission is to close the discovery gap,” said Dr Kevin Kahn, co-founder and CEO of Albatross, in a statement. “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 currently offers two flagship products: the Real-Time Discovery Feed, which curates products and content, and Multimodal Search, which refines results based on evolving user intent and bridges in-store and online experiences through contextual and image inputs. The platform delivers enterprise-grade reliability with near-zero latency. Early pilots demonstrated triple-digit increases in engagement and product discovery, with implementation taking under seven weeks from contract to deployment, and the platform managing billions of data points. The company’s cold-start discovery research, presented at RecSys 2025, now operates at production scale.

Redalpine, which previously led Albatross’s foundation round in 2024, increased their investment further. “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.”