Stockholm, June 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Digital services are increasingly providing personalized experiences by an AI system that reacts almost instantaneously to the user’s actions. TikTok leveraged personalized video as a key differentiator that enabled them to overcome their larger US-based competitors.
Online retailers are increasingly adopting personalization to provide tailored customer experiences. The challenges for the largest companies, such as Zalando, have been how to build and operate the software infrastructure with demanding requirements for high performance, no downtime, security, and governance. Zalando has over 62 million active users and Hopsworks scales to handle millions of operations per second, required for peak load at Cyber week.
“There is a perception that Europe does not have companies that compete in these high-end software platforms that support AI systems. However, today we are pleased to report that Zalando are powering their highest performance, most demanding AI services with a European-owned and operated AI platform, Hopsworks,” says Jim Dowling, CEO of Hopsworks.
The month of June is the conference season for US Data and AI giants, Snowflake and Databricks. You will hear a lot about innovation in Data and AI from them on social media. However, you will not hear as much about the progress at Hopsworks, Europe’s only Lakehouse and AI company. Instead of talking, we are building. A team with over 10 PhDs are building the world’s highest performance data platform to make AI truly interactive. As Jim Dowling says, “Interactive AI systems that don’t respond at ‘human latencies’ will not be considered intelligent, they will just be considered slow.”
About Hopsworks
Hopsworks is the leading unified platform for building batch, real-time, and LLM-powered AI systems, enabling organisations to go from raw data to production-ready AI and Data products at scale. As a European-founded, sovereign AI platform, Hopsworks is purpose-built for organisations that require data sovereignty and regulatory compliance. At its core is a powerful AI Lakehouse, combining a best-in-class feature store, model registry, and vector database covering the full pipeline lifecycle from data ingestion to batch, real-time, and agentic inference.
*Based on a reported €17.6B GMV in 2025, Zalando overtook Allegro (€16.5 bn) and Otto Group (€15B) to become Europe’s largest online retailer.
