Albatross raises CHF 9.7 million to reinvent product discovery for the web

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 €10.5 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 CHF12.5 million ($16 million), following a CHF 2.8 million foundation round in September 2024 led by Redalpine. Albatross is headquartered in Baar (Zug) with an office in Zurich and a team of 14.

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. Early pilots have shown triple-digit uplifts in engagement and product discovery. Integration takes less than seven weeks from signature to deployment.

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.

“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.”

Albatross’s two flagship products – the Real-Time Discovery Feed and Multimodal Search – give companies of any size access to technology once reserved for the largest global platforms. 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.

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.”

(Press release / SK)
Picture L-R: Matteo Ruffini, Kevin Kahn, Johan Boissard