Ex-Amazon AI Leaders Raise $12.5 Million To Build Real-Time Online Product Discovery

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, 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 — and they struggle to capture what really…