4Founders Bets €400K on Reply Next’s Store Agents

Reply Next has raised €400,000 in pre-seed funding for AI agents that run reviews, maps listings and AI-search presence for every store in a chain. 4Founders Capital led the round, with angels Juanjo Mostazo and David Alcobero, and the company disclosed it on September 24, 2026.

KFC, Air Europa and Comess Group are already clients. Founder Miguel Peñate spent nine years at Google before he built the product.

A Tiny Cheque Against KFC and Air Europa

The Barcelona firm 4Founders Capital invests from pre-seed to Series A+ with tickets from €100,000 to €4 million, so this cheque is four times its floor and a tenth of its ceiling. Mostazo, a SeedRocket mentor and K Fund technologist, and Barcelona angel David Alcobero joined. The money is meant to thicken the technology and sales benches, speed up the product, and add agents that can act without a human on every ticket.

Peñate said Reply Next already runs several thousand digital channels, most of them for large groups. The names he put on the record in September 2026 were KFC, Air Europa and Comess Group, the owner of Lizarran and Levaduramadre. Restaurant chains, travel, retail and mobile apps are the verticals he wants, because a missed review or a weak Maps pin there turns into empty tables and unused rooms.

THE CHEQUE AGAINST THE BOOK

• The round: €400,000 pre-seed, led by 4Founders Capital on September 24, 2026.
• Foreign share: 15% of business already comes from outside Spain, Peñate said.
• Headcount band: the Madrid LinkedIn page puts the firm in the 11 to 50 employee range, against eight staff in April 2025.
• Earlier baseline: about 50 clients and 200,000 reviews a month in April 2025, with no outside money.

That sequence is the wager. Spanish pre-seed cheques often arrive before a logo sheet. This one arrived after KFC and Air Europa were already on it, which is why a €400,000 line looks odd until you read it as a first institutional seat rather than a war chest.

Peñate Left Google With Maps Still Blind

Peñate is an engineer who joined Google in Ireland in 2015 after stints at Accenture and Deloitte. From October 2019 he led mobile apps for Spain and Portugal. He has said he spent nine years at the company, then went back to the Canary Islands to start Reply Next, which the Madrid LinkedIn page dates to 2024.

The hole he is selling is operational, not poetic. Chains dump reviews, ratings, messages, searches and recommendations onto Google Maps, Booking, the App Store, Google Play and the new AI answer boxes, then fail to turn that noise into a store-level action. He has said nine out of ten companies cannot say how much revenue each shop pulls through Google Maps, that 70% of brands do not reply on public channels, and that fewer than 10% of businesses show up in AI-powered search results.

FROM GOOGLE TO THE ROUND

1. 2015: Joins Google in Ireland after Accenture and Deloitte.
2. October 2019: Takes the mobile apps lead for Spain and Portugal.
3. 2024: Returns to the Canary Islands and founds Reply Next, with a Madrid headquarters listed later.
4. April 2, 2025: Reports eight staff, about 50 clients, 200,000 reviews a month, and no outside funding, after a second-place EmprendeXXI finish.
5. October 10, 2025: Wins the Canarias Destino Startup pitch and a €10,000 prize from the Cabildo of Gran Canaria.
6. May 2025 to 2026: Tony Santana, formerly of Trivago and TripAdvisor, joins as head of sales from Las Palmas; Diego Martín Hernández joins as chief technology officer.
7. September 17, 2026: Peñate pitches at the Overbooking Gran Canaria tourism summit.
8. September 24, 2026: 4Founders leads the €400,000 pre-seed.

In April 2025 he also offered a blunt Maps rule of thumb: raising a restaurant chain by half a point on Google Maps can lift billing by 15%. That 15% is a rating-to-revenue claim, separate from the 15% of current business he now says already comes from abroad.

What the Agents Do Inside Each Store

Reply Next’s public site describes an agentic platform for multi-location brands, split into local visibility work and review replies written in the brand’s voice. The company lists more than 600 brands managed, more than 10,000 locations, and 97.5% average response coverage. Peñate’s September account is more useful than the marketing strip: the agents are supposed to answer customers, flag problems and openings, watch competitors, and carry out tasks inside each brand’s rules.

The product has a simple specimen. A restaurant group can tell the software to auto-reply to 3, 4 and 5 star reviews and leave 1 and 2 star notes for people, so the night shift is not writing thank-you notes at midnight. Athos Perentos of MACHAPP Software Ltd said the same stack, pointed at the App Store and Google Play, saved his team more than three hours every week.

FOUR JOBS THE AGENTS ARE SOLD TO RUN

• Replies: Answer reviews and public messages in the brand’s voice, at each location.
• Faults: Spot the same complaint repeating at one shop, then surface it before head office does.
• Rivals: Watch nearby listings and ratings so a store sees when it is losing the map pin.
• Presence: Keep Maps, Booking, app-store pages and AI-search answers in line with the brand’s facts.

Peñate told interviewers the aim is that each site, or each group, has an AI that understands what is happening around it and helps it choose better. He listed the signals: a Booking review, a Maps search, a ChatGPT question about the best option nearby, a comparison before a reservation, a delivery-app order. Those traces sit on a dozen platforms. A group with tens or hundreds of sites cannot read them by hand, he said, let alone turn them into decisions.

Nine out of ten companies don’t know how much revenue their stores generate through Google Maps, 70% of brands don’t respond to users on public channels, and fewer than 10% of businesses appear in AI-powered search engine results. Reply Next was created to close this gap and give each location the intelligence it needs to compete.

Miguel Peñate, founder and CEO, Reply Next

He is also pitching below the big groups. A Spanish SME with five, ten or twenty shops, he said, still has to keep Maps current, answer reviews, and see how each local stacks up, and until now that stack of tools lived with companies that already had money. The line is that a ten-site chain should get the same agents as a multinational with thousands of pins.

1.2% Make ChatGPT’s Local Shortlist

Peñate’s “fewer than 10%” line is a pitch statistic. An independent cut of the same problem landed in January 2026 from SOCi, which builds software for multi-location brands. Its 2026 Local Visibility Index ran across more than 350,000 locations and 2,751 brands and found that ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of locations. Gemini recommended 11%, Perplexity 7.4%. The same brands appeared in Google’s local 3-pack 35.9% of the time. SOCi called AI visibility nearly 30 times more selective than that pack; 35.9 divided by 1.2 is 29.9.

AI VERSUS THE GOOGLE 3-PACK

Locations ChatGPT did name averaged 4.3 stars, against 3.9 on Gemini and 4.1 on Perplexity. In retail, only 45% of the brands that led traditional local search also led AI recommendations. Weak listings, middling ratings near 3.4 stars, and review reply rates under 5% translated into no AI presence at all in the financial brands SOCi flagged.

BrightLocal’s 2026 local AI study, a different sample, found Maps mentions in 66% of searches for tracked businesses, against 32% to 38% on AI surfaces (38% in AI Overviews, 33% in ChatGPT, 32% in AI Mode). Maps also held still: 99% agreement across repeat attempts, against 91% to 96% for the AI products. A store can rank on the map and still miss the answer box a traveller now trusts on a phone.

That is the second-order market 4Founders is underwriting with a small cheque. Review-reply software is old. Being the business an AI names when someone asks for the best chicken shop or the nearest ticket desk is new, and almost empty.

Twelve Million Locations, and Counting

The empty field is not empty of vendors. Yext, the listed US platform, said in June 2026 that it now opens its full stack to other AI tools, with brand-verified facts and local competitive data spanning 12 million business locations across 186 countries, more than a million new locations a month, and agents that scan AI and classic search. Christian Ward, Yext’s chief data officer, put the dataset at 10 billion signals, 150 visibility metrics per location, and 20 local rivals tracked for every target business across four AI models.

Yext’s listings product pushes verified data through direct integrations with 200-plus publishers, and it now sells that feed as something ChatGPT and Gemini can cite. Birdeye, Reputation, SOCi and BrightLocal are all on the same slide: agentic marketing for brands with hundreds or thousands of sites, review replies, listing repair, AI-search tracking. A Madrid pre-seed does not outrun that spend. It tries to own the European mid-market, in Spanish and in the verticals Peñate already knows from Google’s app years, before those platforms finish localising the pitch.

English-language tech feeds treated the €400,000 line as a brief and moved on. The louder argument about who gets named in ChatGPT is happening on those vendors’ own blogs, which is a tell. Reply Next is still a local filing. The category it wants to occupy is already a US product meeting.

The Hires Came Before the Money

Jesús Monleón, co-founder of 4Founders Capital, said managing digital presence across thousands of sites is a growing problem for brands, that Reply Next turns that pile of information into actions, and that Peñate’s Google years plus the team’s view of how brands, consumers and AI will interact convinced the firm the company can grow and lead the market. 4Founders’ public criteria match the cheque: founding teams with an international mindset and a shot at companies worth more than €300 million, projects that scale on a strong tech core, and a wish to sit in the next round as well as this one.

Mostazo’s presence is a second signal. He is an engineer, a co-founder of Homa Games, and one of the more active Spanish angels, now also K Fund’s technology chief. Alcobero is a Barcelona angel with a data and analytics background who writes through Anguila Ventures. Neither man needed this round to exist. They are underwriting a founder who has already sold the product into chicken shops, an airline and a multi-brand restaurant group, then hired a Canaries-based salesperson who used to sit inside Trivago and TripAdvisor.

Tony Santana joined as head of sales before the raise was public, posting in May 2026 that he would do the work from home in the islands. Diego Martín Hernández came in as CTO in the same build-out. The €400,000 is, in that light, fuel for a commercial motion that had already started, not the first proof that anyone would buy the software.

Spain Pays First as Italy and Mexico Wait

Spain is still the priority market and the source of most sales effort. Peñate said the next countries on the list are Italy and the United Kingdom in Europe, and Mexico in Latin America, again in restaurants, tourism, mobile apps and retail. Short term, he wants to keep compounding at home while laying the rails for that expansion. Fifteen percent of revenue from abroad is a start, not a network.

The Canary Islands thread runs through the firm even with a Madrid HQ on the filings. Peñate went back there to found it. Santana is selling from Las Palmas. Early Canarian clients named in 2025 included Mr. Kale and Auto Reisen, beside national names such as La Liga and the IKONO museum chain. On September 17, 2026, a week before the round, Peñate was still on a Gran Canaria tourism stage. The geography is a labour story as much as a branding one: hire where the founder can, sell where the chains are.

What the cheque will not do is buy a Yext-scale knowledge graph or a 200-publisher pipe. It pays for more engineers, more sales people, and a new set of agents that are supposed to stop at a store’s guidelines and still move a pin, a reply, or a warning without a regional manager in the loop. If those agents do that for the ten-site groups Peñate keeps citing, 4Founders gets the follow-on it said it wanted. If they only polish reviews for logos already on the slide, the €400,000 will look exactly as small as it is.