Reply Next raises €400,000 pre-seed round led by 4Founders Capital

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Reply Next, a Spanish start-up whose AI platform lets brands with hundreds or thousands of outlets run each location's digital presence from one place, has closed a €400,000 pre-seed round. 4Founders Capital led it, and business angels including Juanjo Mostazo and David Alcobero joined.

The premise is that every shop now has a second, online existence, where reviews, ratings, messages and searches accumulate on Google Maps, Booking, the App Store, Google Play and AI search engines. By the count of founder and CEO Miguel Peñate, much of it goes unanswered: 70% of brands do not reply to users on public channels, nine in ten companies cannot say what revenue Google Maps brings their stores, and fewer than 10% of businesses show up in AI search results. Reply Next's agents respond to customers, flag problems and opportunities, watch competitors and carry out tasks within each brand's rules. The company says it already handles more than 2,500 brand channels, has raised store visits by 15%, and counts Air Europa, KFC and Comess Group as clients.

The money will go to the technology and sales teams, product development and new AI agents meant to automate key processes and decisions. Reply Next recently hired Tony Santana, formerly of Trivago and Tripadvisor, as head of sales, and Diego Martín Hernández as CTO. Peñate, a telecoms engineer, spent nine years at Google leading mobile apps for several countries, after consulting stints at Deloitte and Accenture.