Reply Next raises €400K pre-seed to put AI agents on Google Maps

Spanish startup Reply Next has raised a €400K pre-seed round led by Barcelona’s 4Founders Capital, joined by business angels Juanjo Mostazo and David Alcobero, to put AI agents in charge of how multi-location brands appear and answer across Google Maps, Booking and the app stores.

Announced on 24 September 2026, it is the smallest round we have covered this week – and after seven days of legaltech, defence and gaming cheques with far more zeros, that is exactly why it deserves a look. Below, I lay out what a €400K ticket says about where the AI agent wave goes to work next.

A first cheque from Barcelona’s founder-run fund

The pre-seed is led by 4Founders Capital, the Barcelona firm run by serial entrepreneurs that writes tickets from €100K to €4M between pre-seed and Series A. Business angels Juanjo Mostazo and David Alcobero complete the table.

The money goes to strengthening the technology and sales teams, accelerating development of the core platform, and building new AI agents that automate business processes and operational decisions – the company’s words, and an ambitious to-do list for €400K. Pre-seed in Spain still runs lean; nobody told the roadmap.

Reviews, ratings and messages, answered by software

Reply Next, founded by telecommunications engineer Miguel Peñate, gives brands with many physical locations one dashboard for their entire digital presence: the reviews, ratings and customer messages scattered across Google Maps, Booking, the App Store and Google Play. Its AI agents answer customers automatically, monitor competitors and flag business opportunities location by location.

“Nine out of ten companies don’t know how much revenue their stores generate through Google Maps,” Peñate says in the announcement. “Reply Next was created to close this gap and give each location the intelligence it needs to compete.”

Anyone who has run a chain knows the problem he is describing. A brand with 200 outlets has 200 review pages, 200 sets of opening hours and 200 message inboxes – and, in most organisations, nobody whose actual job is to answer them. The head office sees the brand; the customer sees one shop on one map.

A reputation market compounding at 14.6%

The segment Reply Next sells into is bigger than its ticket suggests. Reputation management software is a USD 4.91bn market in 2026, headed for USD 9.68bn by 2031 – a 14.60% CAGR – per Mordor Intelligence, September 2026. Inside it, review management is the fastest-growing product slice at 16.77% a year, and SMEs are the fastest-growing buyers at 17.45% – precisely the intersection where a Spanish pre-seed can build.

For scale against our own records: Reecall raised €3.5M this same week to industrialise white-label voice AI for customer conversations, and Zeliq took €7M to launch an AI sales agent. Customer-facing AI agents are getting funded at every altitude right now; you can follow all of them on our fundraising data page.

The unglamorous end of the agent wave

So where do AI agents actually earn their keep? The showy end of the wave is code generation and defence autonomy. The money end may be answering a two-star review politely at 11pm, in the right language, for the 143rd outlet of a hotel group. What we are seeing, round after round, is agents moving into work that was never anyone’s job – and multi-location presence management is a textbook case.

There is a second current underneath. As search shifts towards AI assistants, a location’s structured presence – its reviews, photos, opening hours, response rate – stops being cosmetic and becomes the raw material machines read before recommending anywhere. The good news is Europe is dense in exactly the customer this serves: the high-street chains, hotel groups and franchise networks that anchor our cities.

Watch whether Reply Next can turn a €400K head start into the Iberian reference before better-funded rivals arrive – and watch whether the platforms themselves, Google first, decide to build the reply layer in. The window for independents is open, but it is not eternal. Let’s see who moves faster!