By: Chris Chuang, CEO and Co-founder
For the third year in a row, Relay has been named to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America.
This year, Relay ranks at No. 830, up 90 places from 2025, placing us among the top 17% of fastest growing companies on this year’s list.
Making the Inc. 5000 once is an exciting milestone, but earning a place three years in a row, while making these meaningful jumps up the rankings, means something more. It shows that Relay is consistently delivering compelling business outcomes for our customers, and that our growth is not tied to a single product, vertical segment, or moment in time. It reflects sustained demand for the digital transformation Relay delivers to frontline businesses – particularly in the industrial and hospitality sectors – improving the communications, safety, and productivity of their teams.
For Relay, being named to this year’s list validates both our business momentum and the scale of the problem we are solving. Frontline workers power the physical economy, yet the primary tool they have traditionally relied upon are basic analog radios. Today’s demanding operations require the real time insights that can only be found in the human signal layer: structured, timestamped, location-specific records of what actually happened based on what workers are actually saying – translated from whatever language they speak.
That is the power of our Relay platform. And one key reason why Relay is being chosen by nearly 10 percent of the Fortune 500 to drive their digital transformation is because we spent fifteen years perfecting the critical but unglamorous building blocks: the connectivity and the hardware that make the data accurate enough to trust.
A Pattern of Innovation, Growth and Workplace Impact
Today’s Inc. 5000 recognition follows several other recent awards that speak to different aspects of Relay’s progress:
- The 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list recognized Relay among North America’s fastest-growing technology companies.
- Relay was named a 2026 Inc. Regionals: Mid-Atlantic honoree.
- Our workplace has been recognized through the Triangle Business Journal’s Best Places to Work and has earned the 2026 Quantum Certified Workplace designation from Quantum Workplace.
Together, these honors reflect the company we are building and that I’m proud to be a part of: innovative, fast-growing, in service to our customers, and grounded in a mission that matters.
From Frontline Communication to Frontline Intelligence
Relay began by giving frontline teams a simpler, more reliable way to communicate and keep their teams safe. Delivering on those critical services in a simple way that requires nearly no behavior change has earned us a place on the belts, shoulders, and in the hands of hundreds of thousands of frontline workers. With the hundreds of millions of radio messages and billions of location data points flowing through our platform, Relay also unlocks the power of real time operational intelligence from the human signal layer for our customers.
Our accelerating momentum across Industrial sectors like food and beverage, automotive, and steel manufacturing illustrates how Relay is purpose built for the harsh realities of the frontline world. These are loud, multilingual, high-velocity and data-intensive environments where it’s costly for workers to have to stop their actual frontline work just to log into a nearby screen to digitally track the work they are doing.
At Relay, we believe voice is the secret weapon to digital transformation. That’s because it requires minimal to no behavior change or work stoppages from frontline teams, and it captures the operational signals already moving through the floor in real time. That is what makes Relay different: our device feels as intuitive as a walkie-talkie, but it is connected to a sophisticated enterprise platform that turns those communications into structured, actionable intelligence for both workers and supervisors.
Instead of requiring employees to slow down and context-switch into enterprise systems, Relay brings real time intelligence directly into the workflow. The result is a single source of frontline truth from the human signal layer. Relay is both the first device a worker reaches for during a shift and the first dashboard a supervisor checks in the morning.
What Comes Next for Relay?
Recognition is valuable because it gives us a moment to look back, but the more important question is what we do next.
For Relay, the answer is clear: we will keep expanding the operational intelligence available to frontline teams while making it practical, immediate and easy to use. We will continue entering industries where outdated tools limit the safety and productivity of frontline teams. And we will keep building alongside customers who believe the frontline should be as connected, safe, and informed as every other part of the enterprise.
None of that happens without great people doing exceptional work. At Relay, we call it BWIML: the best work in my life. It is more than a cultural phrase; it is the standard we hold ourselves to. I am proud to say that we have some of the best people in the business, and this recognition reflects the ambition, creativity and commitment they bring to Relay every day.
To our customers, partners, investors and every member of the Relay team: thank you. Three consecutive years on the Inc. 5000 would not be possible without your trust, ideas and hard work. And more importantly, it’s just the beginning. We can’t wait to work together on the chapter ahead.
Chris Chuang is the co-founder and CEO of Relay, with 25+ years in software and telecom, including Republic Wireless and Bandwidth Inc. Earlier in his career, he was a VC at Technology Crossover Ventures and a consultant at McKinsey. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Stanford.
