Zurich-based
AI company Albatross has raised €10.5 million in new funding to develop a
real-time product and content discovery platform that learns, reasons, and
adapts as users interact. The round was led by MMC Ventures with participation
from Redalpine, Daphni, and strategic angels.
This
brings Albatross’s total funding to €13.5 million, following a €3 million
foundation round in September 2024 led by Redalpine.
Founded
in 2024 by former Amazon AI leaders Dr Kevin Kahn and Dr Matteo Ruffini,
together with serial entrepreneur Johan Boissard, Albatross focuses on what the
team views as a key missing piece in the AI landscape. While much of the
industry is centred on large language models that generate content, Albatross
is developing a complementary pillar: understanding how users perceive and
interact with content in real time. The platform is built on transformer-based
architecture with sequential embedding models trained directly on live events.
Traditional
recommendation systems are typically batch-trained and rely on factors such as
popularity, similarity, or historical user behaviour, making it difficult to
fully capture real-time intent. Albatross replaces these systems with AI that
learns continuously from live behaviour, updating in milliseconds as users
browse, search, and explore, without manual intervention or retraining. The
platform is designed to adapt instantly to changes in user behaviour, enabling
more responsive and context-aware recommendations.
The
platform is already serving billions of live events and tens of millions of
predictions each month across marketplaces, retail, and travel platforms
worldwide, processing around one hundred million products and tens of millions of users.
“Our
system perceives and adapts instantly, so every search and feed reflects the
user’s intent at that very moment,” said Dr Kevin Kahn, Co-founder and CEO of
Albatross.
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, the Real-Time Discovery Feed and Multimodal Search, are
designed to give companies of all sizes access to recommendation technology
previously available mainly to large global platforms. The Discovery Feed
curates products and content dynamically, while the Multimodal Search engine refines
results based on changing user intent and can connect in-store and online
journeys using contextual and image-based inputs. The platform is built for
enterprise environments and is designed to operate with very low latency.
Early
pilots have reported triple-digit increases in engagement in engagement and
product discovery. Integration typically takes less than seven weeks from
contract to deployment, and the system is built to handle billions of data
points.
As
content and commerce expand rapidly, discovery is becoming a central challenge
in the digital economy. Albatross aims to make digital experiences more
adaptive by enabling people to find relevant products and content in the
moment.