Former Amazon AI leaders raise $12.5M to deploy AI that understands user intent in real time, transforming how millions discover products and content online. The platform learns continuously from live behavior, replacing static recommendation systems with dynamic intelligence that adapts moment-to-moment.
Every click online tells a story. Yet the systems behind most of the internet still treat users as static profiles, recycling yesterday’s data to predict tomorrow’s intent. Albatross, a Zurich-based AI company founded by former Amazon AI leaders, has raised $12.5 million in new funding to rewrite that logic with 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 a hundred million products and tens of millions of end users.
Founded in 2024 by Dr Kevin Kahn and Dr Matteo Ruffini, both former Amazon AI leaders, 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 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. They 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. Notably, until now no platform could adapt instantly to changes in user behavior. Albatross is the first to do this.
“Our mission is to close the discovery gap,” said Dr Kevin Kahn, Co-Founder and CEO of Albatross. “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 – 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.
For MMC Ventures, the investment was as much about timing as technology. “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 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.”
As content and commerce continue to explode, discovery is becoming the defining challenge of the digital economy. Albatross’s goal is to make digital experiences adaptive – transforming the way people find what inspires them, in real time.
