Albatross, a Zurich-based AI company founded by former Amazon AI leaders, has secured $12.5 million to expand a system built to understand what users want the moment they act online.
The fresh capital lifts the firm’s total funding to $16 million and enhances its real-time discovery technology deeper into global retail, marketplaces, and travel platforms.
The round was led by MMC Ventures with backing from Redalpine, Daphni and a group of angels. The company’s system already handles billions of live interactions each month and delivers tens of millions of predictions for partners across several industries.
The startup was created in 2024 by Dr Kevin Kahn and Dr Matteo Ruffini, both former Amazon AI leaders, alongside entrepreneur Johan Boissard. They argue that the growth of generative AI has overshadowed the need to understand how people behave, browse, and change their minds in real time.
Most recommendation engines still work off batch-trained models and recycled data. They guess based on what users liked yesterday. Albatross takes a different route.
Its transformer-based architecture reads live activity, learns from it instantly, and adjusts results within milliseconds, without any manual retraining. According to the company, no previous system has been able to adapt at this speed.
Speaking on the company’s mission, Dr Kahn, co-founder and CEO, 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.”
The company’s flagship tools, the Real-Time Discovery Feed and the Multimodal Search engine, are designed to enhance what users see as their behaviour shifts. The system can connect online and in-store journeys, react to image inputs, and run at near-zero latency.
Early trials have delivered strong results, with some partners recording triple-digit growth in engagement and product discovery. Deployment takes less than seven weeks, and the platform now powers what the team presented at RecSys 2025 as the industry’s most advanced approach to cold-start discovery.
For investors, the timing shows a change in how personalisation technology is evolving. Mina Samaan, General Partner at MMC Ventures, said: “Personalisation 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.”
Redalpine, which led the startup’s first round, also increased its commitment. Dr Marc Moesser, Investor at Redalpine, said: “We backed Albatross from the very beginning because of the team’s exceptional depth in AI and personalisation. In just a year, they’ve gone beyond what even the largest platforms achieve with real-time infrastructure that adapts instantly to user behaviour.”
Albatross seeks to build systems that react as quickly as the people using them, and remake the online discovery experience in the process.
