By: Chris Chuang, CEO and Co-founder
Dear Relay Customers,
Two years ago, I wrote to you announcing that Relay had raised our Series B funding. With that funding, we’ve invested in building a market leading solution that earns the right to be worn and carried by your frontline teams, helping them be safer and more productive. Today, I’m delighted to share exciting news that builds on the momentum fueled by your partnership with us, and sets us up to accelerate the next chapter of Relay’s story.
Relay has raised $36 million in new funding, bringing our total funding to date to more than $90 million. The round, which was significantly oversubscribed, was led by International Paper. Joining them as new investors are Cerity Partners, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Thayer Investment Partners, a travel and hospitality-focused fund who partners with corporate leaders representing many of the world’s top hospitality brands. Our Series A (Wind River Ventures) and Series B (G2 Venture Partners) lead investors also increased their investments in Relay through this round. You can read the full press release here.
The most exciting aspect of this round is not the capital itself, but the foundation that drove these organizations to invest in Relay. These investments were earned by the clear transformative value we have delivered to our customers, and the shared alignment we have with them on where we are going next. International Paper was a Relay customer before they became a Relay investor. Thousands of properties represented by Thayer’s investment partners have run on Relay for years before Thayer joined as an investor. The organizations investing in our company’s future have already watched Relay deliver value in their plants and hotels, keeping their workers safe, their managers informed, and their teams more productive. No diligence process, market analysis, or pitch deck compares to seeing actual business outcomes delivered in real-life physical operations settings. At Relay, we believe in proving, not pitching…and this investment round is a financial representation of that philosophy.
This round also strongly reflects how deeply we value feedback from our customers. We invest daily to improve the reliability, safety, and operational intelligence our system delivers to your teams, informed by the feedback we hear from the operators using it. This feedback is rooted in the trusted relationships we have built with our customers, and the fact we earnestly strive to be true long-term partners, not transactional vendors.
What We Are Building Next
Something happens on your floor every shift that nobody writes down. For example, an operator can say into their radio, “that palletizer’s broken three times this week.” This passing comment is rich with context built from years of experience working on a line. But mentioned verbally and informally and never logged as part of the record, it doesn’t drive necessary action until often it’s too late. We call that signal evaporation: knowledge that is spoken, and then lost, whether because nothing digitally captured it or because the alert that carried it was never even seen. Even in operations that have invested millions in purpose-built software, roughly 80% of what happens on the floor never reaches any system at all. Sixty two percent of manufacturers we surveyed said that this missed information and communication breakdowns cause delays, rework, or missed handoffs at least a few times a month.
Relay is the system of action for physical operations: it solves the signal evaporation problem by logging what your frontline team actually says and does, and then helps turn it into timely action in the systems you already run. While implementing Relay is as quick and easy as asking your teams to “carry this new device, not that old clunky one,” Relay’s smart radios are just one of five components of the full system we provide. The others are smart accessories that tailor Relay for the ways your teams want to carry and wear Relay, simple-to-use yet powerful software interfaces for those on your team who do work from laptops and smartphones, AI models and agents specifically built for your industries and environments, and the never-before-logged ground truth data from your human workflows that can drive significant improvements to your key business outcomes and metrics.
There are entire companies devoted to delivering each one of these components, but none that bring them all together in the way Relay does, specifically for frontline teams.
Now armed with this latest round of funding, we will continue to extend our leadership in providing the system of action for physical operations through our investments in:
- Next-generation hardware. Continued investment in expanding Relay’s devices and accessories portfolio to further address the specific uses cases and needs of even the most challenging physical environments.
- AI models. We will continue to advance our proprietary models that we’ve tuned and extended for physical operations environments and frontline specific use cases, including noise cancellation, transcription, translation, location, inference and more.
- Scaling our focus and teams in your markets. More investment across our product, customer success, and go-to-market teams – with a particular focus in the industrial, hospitality, and healthcare segments – so we can continue to partner at a high level with customers today and in the future.
Relay into the Future
Today, Relay runs across nearly 10,000 sites, processes more than a billion operational data points every week, and serves approximately 10% of the Fortune 500 and a majority of the top U.S. companies in key markets, including steel manufacturers, automotive OEMs, paper and packaging manufacturers, and hotel brands. As we’ve grown, our dedication to frontline teams and our conviction in the power of their spoken communications hasn’t changed. We are truly just in the early stages of enabling teams to leverage this previously untapped dataset and act on it for greater efficiency, safety, and insights.
To me, the direction is clear: we don’t just help you know what is happening, we help you drive what actions happen next. I’m excited to share the System of Action for Physical Operations with you – today and in the future. Thank you for trusting us to be a part of your work; it’s the foundation of everything we do.
Chris Chuang, CEO and Co-Founder, Relay
