Albatross raises USD $12.5 million to boost real-time AI discovery

Albatross, a Zurich-based artificial intelligence company, has secured USD $12.5 million in seed funding to develop a real-time product and content discovery platform for online businesses. The round was led by MMC Ventures and included participation from Redalpine, Daphni, and a group of strategic angel investors. This brings the company's total funding to USD $16 million following an earlier foundation round.

Real-time adaptation

Albatross was founded in 2024 by Dr Kevin Kahn and Dr Matteo Ruffini, both of whom previously held senior AI roles at Amazon, along with serial entrepreneur Johan Boissard. The company aims to address what it describes as a core limitation in current online engagement systems-treating users as static profiles based on past interactions. Its new platform replaces traditional recommendation systems with an AI model trained on live, sequential user events and interactions. The system updates its understanding of users' intent in milliseconds, seeking to reflect what each person is interested in at that exact moment.

The company's approach is built on transformer-based architecture and sequential embedding models. Unlike batch-trained systems which rely heavily on popularity and historical data, the Albatross platform adapts continuously as users browse or search, requiring no manual adjustment or retraining.

Platform features

Albatross is already processing billions of live events and tens of millions of predictions monthly across retail, marketplace, and travel sectors. The platform manages around 100 million products and tens of millions of end users worldwide. It supports two main offerings: the Real-Time Discovery Feed and Multimodal Search. The Discovery Feed presents curated product and content suggestions, while Multimodal Search dynamically refines results based on changing user intent and can bridge online and in-store discovery via contextual and image input.

The company reports that early pilot programmes have led to significant increases in user engagement and product discovery, with triple-digit percentage uplifts. Integration for clients reportedly takes less than seven weeks from signing to deployment. Its infrastructure is claimed to operate with enterprise-grade reliability and virtually zero latency.

Investor perspective

"Personalization is entering a new era. 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," said Mina Samaan, General Partner, MMC Ventures.

Redalpine also increased its investment in the company following its earlier foundation round.
"We backed Albatross from the very beginning because of the team's exceptional depth in AI and personalization. In just a year, they've gone beyond what even the largest platforms achieve with real-time infrastructure that adapts instantly to user behavior," said Dr Marc Moesser, Investor at Redalpine.

Discovery challenge

The Albatross founders argue that the rapid expansion of digital content and commerce has made effective discovery a central challenge for many businesses. Their goal is to support a shift from static, profile-based recommendations to real-time, adaptive digital experiences. Company research on the 'cold-start' discovery issue was presented at a major academic conference this year and now underpins the production platform at scale.

Dr Kevin Kahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Albatross, said: "Our mission is to close the discovery gap. 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."