Bluerails

Berlin-adjacent startup founded by jens-mannanal (ex-GetYourGuide). Not a customer — an adjacent player in agent discoverability; relationship is founder-to-founder peer contact.

Current truth

• Pivoted to agentic e-commerce ~mid-June 2026 from cross-border crypto payments (Canada license; Dubai license pursuit dropped, cofounder departed). Old payment rails still serve residual clients (Pasher Foods payouts, on/off-ramps with Block Office).
• Product: 400 test prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, checking both mentions and tool calls; free discoverability report, then periodic (weekly/monthly) tracking at €99/month.
• Scope is pure website optimization (TXT files, schema, sitemaps) — Jens said they do NOT recommend MCP servers and don’t plan to (“wouldn’t go that way”).
• Launched on Product Hunt ~2026-06-22; won Product of the Day; ~300 sign-ups.
• Users skew founders and early-stage companies (many Indian), not CMOs; deciding whether to go vertical (most likely travel, given Jens’s GetYourGuide background) or horizontal.
• Overlap with us is partial: they track discoverability of websites for founders; we optimize MCP/connector discoverability for CMOs/product marketers. Complementary today, could converge.
• [idea] Jens’s read: travel is where the easiest conversations and budget are — hotels treat this like SEO ten years ago (Jens, 2026-07-06).
• [idea] Jens’s read: AI-lab monetization is undecided and will take 1–2 years to settle; the interim money is in selling discoverability to companies that don’t yet understand it (Jens, 2026-07-06).
• [idea] Jens’s read: hotels may eventually need MCPs, or their PMS provider will expose the data for them (Jens, 2026-07-06).

Open questions

• Will Bluerails go vertical in travel or stay horizontal? (Their open roadmap question.)
• Does the Slack intro to their CTO Mike happen, and does it lead to anything (intel exchange, collaboration, or just relationship)?

Timeline

• [2026-07-06] (call) 15-min catch-up Vincent × Jens. Jens walked through the pivot story, demoed the discoverability scanner (400 prompts, 4 platforms, mentions + tool calls, free report → €99/mo tracking), shared Product Hunt results (~300 sign-ups, Product of the Day). Both aligned that industries with unfair intermediary fees (e.g. GetYourGuide’s 40%) are the most motivated buyers and that discoverability is the entry point, payments later. Vincent shared our ADO framing (MCP-first, CMO/product-marketer persona) and the bet that labs will control monetization via native connector marketplaces. Commitment: Jens to connect Vincent with Bluerails’ CTO Mike via Slack for a deeper technical conversation. Transcript: raw/calls/2026-07-06-15-min-meeting-between-jens-mannanal-and-vincent-m-not_VLcbdm3fDiB6FX.md