Zurich, February 12, 2026 (Globe Newswire) — Walapop, Spain’s leading platform for conscious consumption, today announced a strategic partnership with Swiss AI company Albatross to deploy real-time AI discovery across its platform, increasing user engagement and seller visibility at an unprecedented scale.
With Albatross, Wallapop becomes one of the first C2C marketplaces in the world to move beyond a static, history-based recommendation system to in-session adaptive discovery that understands user intent as it unfolds.
In practice, this means that discovery on Wallapop will be more proactive and faster. For example, if a user looks at used sofas and then starts browsing rugs or floor lamps, the system understands the transition from single item ratings to living space furniture. Rather than continually showing more sofas, like traditional recommenders, Discovery adapts in real time to reflect the user’s evolving intent, highlighting relevant and complementary items across categories, including products the user didn’t know existed.
The experience continues to evolve as the session continues. When a user clicks on a vintage coffee table, they may start seeing lighting, paintings, decorations, or storage items that match the same style, even if they’ve never explicitly looked for it. This allows users to find relevant listings that feel like genuine discoveries rather than variations on something they’ve already seen. Importantly, this keeps your discovery abreast as your interests change (even within the same session), ensuring you’re seeing the right listings at the right time.
This announcement follows Albatross recently raising $12.25 million in funding to deploy its real-time recognition layer. Technology designed to understand what users want at that moment. Forbes recently described this approach as “the second pillar of AI.” While generative AI is changing the way content is created, Albatross focuses on how content is discovered in environments where scale and choice overwhelm traditional personalization.
Initial production deployments have shown greater impact than can be achieved with traditional recommenders. In a four-week A/B test on 10% of Wallapop’s traffic, measuring the performance of the overall homepage experience, the platform delivered the following results:
- Increase in user engagement: +118.9%
- Increase in likes and interactions: +104.8%
- Increase in purchase intent: +46.9%
Importantly, the system has demonstrated the ability to reveal previously invisible products to qualified buyers, unlocking potential supply rather than simply expanding an already popular listing. These gains were remarkably stable and continued to improve over a long production period of 4 months, highlighting the robustness of the approach beyond short-term experiments.
Albatross Founders: (L-R), Dr. Matteo Ruffini, Dr. Kevin Kahn, Johan Boissard.
For Wallapop, this shift goes beyond buyer relevance. The partnership introduces algorithmic seller discovery as a core capability, dynamically matching actual buyer intent with relevant shippable listings to address one of recommerce’s toughest challenges: ensuring quality supply is not lost in quantity.
“At Wallapop, we aim to be a system that understands what users want in real time, helping buyers find the right products faster and sellers more effectively visualizing their products.” say Rob Cassedy, Wallapop CEO. “Working with Albatross represents another step in our mission to empower people to participate in more conscious consumption models that create economic opportunities.”
Unlike traditional recommenders, which are built on past behavior and popularity signals, Albatross’ technology continuously interprets live user interactions. Every action within a session updates the system’s understanding of user intent and the catalog, enabling discovery that can instantly adapt to changing behavior, supply dynamics, and context. This approach is particularly useful in second-hand goods markets, where millions of unique items with inconsistent metadata invalidate traditional popularity and similarity-based methods.
For Albatross, Wallapop represents a demanding real-world environment for AI discovery. With its constantly evolving catalog of unique products and high listing speed, Wallapop provides an ideal setting for validating and extending in-session recognition models under real market constraints.
“Together with Wallapop, we are delivering an online discovery experience that rivals the best in-store experiences, where users discover true hidden gems in real time, customized just for them.” Dr. Kevin Kahn, Albatross AI CEO. “While large-scale language models understand the meaning of words, Albatross’ perceptual models understand the order and context in which user actions occur. This partnership marks a fundamental shift in discovery, search, and personalization, which has seen little innovation in more than a decade.”
This partnership represents one of the earliest large-scale commercial deployments of adaptive in-session AI discovery in recommerce and strengthens Wallapop’s ambitions to lead the next stage of market evolution.
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About Wallapop
Wallapop is the leading platform for conscious and humane consumption in Spain. Founded in Barcelona in 2013 and with offices in Spain, Italy and Portugal, Wallapop aims to create a unique inventory ecosystem of repurposed products that promotes more humane and sustainable consumption models. The platform connects 21 million users who visit monthly and collectively create more than 100 million listings annually. Wallapop makes it easy, fast and secure to buy and sell consumer goods products in all categories. It is also a reference for more specific categories such as automobiles.
About Albatross
Albatross is an AI platform for real-time discovery. Founded in Switzerland in 2024, Albatross is leading the transition from AI generation to real-time recognition, driving engagement in online marketplaces by adapting discovery and search to a user’s current interests. Today, Albatross orchestrates discovery across over 100 million products and processes billions of user interactions. The company is a recipient of the Tech for Retail 2025 Innovation Award and has raised $16 million from MMC Ventures, Redalpine, and Daphni.
