Albatross raises €3M formation round to drive user engagement

Swiss AI startup Albatross today announced a €3M funding round led by redalpine, with participation from Daphni. Albatross is set to transform user engagement across eCommerce, media, and online marketplaces with AI-driven personalization, unlocking unprecedented conversions and revenue growth for businesses.

Founded by Dr. Kevin Kahn, Dr. Matteo Ruffini, and Johan Boissard, experts who led machine learning and recommendation platforms at Amazon and have a proven track record of building tech businesses at scale, Albatross is poised to reshape how online businesses engage with their users.

Albatross solves a well-known problem that businesses face today: high churn due to outdated, uninspiring recommendations, leading to missed revenue and unhappy users. Traditional recommendation systems struggle to adapt to rapidly evolving catalogs, trends, and user interests, losing opportunities to convert users and unlock revenue.

Albatross AI-driven solutions generate engaging user journeys that evolve in real-time with each user interaction, from recommending the right product to determining how it’s presented (such as the image or title). Similar to how YouTube and Spotify help users discover new content, Albatross ensures that users feel as though they’re uncovering hidden gems tailored just for them. Without relying on invasive tracking, Albatross drives engagement, boosts conversions, and recaptures otherwise missed revenue, directly impacting business top and bottom lines.

"Users want to be inspired and guided in their discovery journey," said Dr. Kevin Kahn, CEO. "Most recommendation systems react to user intent, but this approach falls short in a world where catalogs and user interests evolve rapidly. To make things worse, traditional technologies over-focus on popular items, leaving most catalogs undiscovered and leading to user fatigue. Our platform ensures fresh recommendations, dynamically matching users with the right products and at the right time."

Albatross overcomes the limitations of traditional A/B testing and static personalization models, offering fully automated, real-time optimization powered by deep learning, multi-armed bandits (MABs), and reinforcement learning. This allows businesses to generate, orchestrate, and present engaging experiences that resonate with each user, recapturing otherwise lost revenue.

"We’re excited to empower such an incredible team with an established track record in AI and personalization right at the inception of Albatross." said Marc Moesser, Investor at redalpine. "The platform that Albatross is building has the potential to be a game-changer for the industry, aiming to bring a sophistication to personalization for businesses of all sizes that is currently only seen at companies like YouTube and Netflix."

Gilles Despas, CEO of Bark.com and an investor in Albatross, commented: “Personalization is a game-changer, and Albatross is uniquely positioned to disrupt the market with their scalable, AI-driven approach."