Relay Raises $36 Million in New Funding from Industry Leaders to Drive Frontline Safety, Productivity, and Operational Intelligence

Investment round led by industrial leader International Paper, alongside other new investors Cerity Partners, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Thayer Investment Partners

RALEIGH, N.C., Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Relay, the system of action for physical operations, today announced it has raised $36 million in new funding, bringing total capital raised to over $90 million. Relay's latest funding round, which was significantly oversubscribed, represents a powerful alignment among industry leaders with Relay's vision for the future of frontline work: one that is safer, better connected, and empowered with the spoken intelligence of its workers.

As a signal of Relay's growing leadership in industrial digital transformation, the round was led by International Paper, a Fortune 500 leader in sustainable packaging solutions, with more than 125 years of manufacturing experience. Other new investors include clients of Cerity Partners, a nationally recognized wealth and investment management firm with over $200 billion in assets under management which also manages venture investments for Fortune 500 companies, Harmonic Growth Partners, a leading expansion-stage investor that pairs experienced investors with successful former venture-backed CEOs to help management teams navigate the challenges of scale, and Thayer Investment Partners, who partners with corporate leaders representing many of the world's top hospitality brands. Earlier lead investors G2 Venture Partners and Wind River Ventures also increased their investments in this round.

"What makes this round special isn't simply the capital being raised – it's the alignment with leaders from the industries we serve on how Relay can help them digitally transform their physical operations," said Chris Chuang, CEO and Co-Founder of Relay. "International Paper understands Relay not just from an investor standpoint, but from the perspective of a customer witnessing the transformational value Relay delivers across its highly demanding industrial environments. Similarly, Thayer brings perspective from multiple leading hotel brands that already run Relay across thousands of properties. It's a powerful endorsement when customers aren't just buying your system but are also betting on the company behind it."

Earning the Right to Serve the Frontlines

Companies have invested billions digitizing physical operations, yet frontline workers remain underserved with analog tools or technology designed for the desk rather than the harsher realities of physical operations. Frontline teams operate production lines, maintain equipment, clean hotel rooms, care for patients, respond to emergencies, and keep complex facilities running – activities that are often incompatible, and sometimes dangerous, with interacting and entering data on a screen.

Some of the most valuable operational knowledge lives in what workers say over their radios, not what is typed or logged into MES, CMMS, PMS, or other static reporting systems built to digitize workflows. In fact, according to recent research from Relay of 500 manufacturing professionals, 57 percent say their most important operational communication happens out loud, in person. Only 17 percent said almost everything frontline workers notice and flag ends up in a system, log, or formal report. Relay calls what slips through signal evaporation. And that gap has a meaningful cost, with 79 percent saying communication breakdowns cause delays, rework, or missed handoffs at least a few times a month.¹

With Relay, workers simply continue communicating how they have for decades — pick up a radio, wear it during their shift, and push to talk. But behind that familiar interaction is a robust system that combines the power of cloud communications, AI, real-time translation, location awareness, and automated workflows - all packaged in modern, durable, next-gen hardware built specifically for the frontlines.

"We run complex and demanding industrial operations, where strong communications isn't a nice-to-have – it's foundational," said Keith Townsend, Group Vice President, Packaging Solutions North America, International Paper. "Relay has proven it can deliver clear, dependable communications in extremely loud and challenging industrial environments. Relay goes beyond communications to improve shift transitions, strengthen operating processes, accelerate responses to safety and maintenance alerts, and connect frontline insights into operational systems. We invested because we envision Relay as an important part of our modern industrial technology stack."

"Thayer has a unique vantage point on hospitality technology, as our investment partners represent many of the world's leading hospitality companies," said Chris Hemmeter, Managing Partner at Thayer. "Relay is increasingly becoming a standard in hospitality, particularly in more complex and demanding luxury hotel, resort, and casino properties. With Relay's AI-powered system, teams are safer, more connected, and ultimately more effective at delivering exceptional guest experiences."

Accelerating the Next Chapter

As enterprises accelerate investments in automation and AI, Relay believes competitive advantage will increasingly depend on how effectively organizations link machine intelligence with the knowledge of the people driving the physical actions required in their operations. The new funding will accelerate Relay's software and AI platform capabilities – including its insights and agentic layer that will allow teams to query their shift data and act on it – worker safety solutions, integrations with other enterprise systems, next-generation frontline hardware, expansion across the industrial and hospitality markets, and continued hiring across its product and go-to-market teams.

Relay serves hundreds of thousands of frontline workers and works with approximately 10 percent of the Fortune 500, including multiple companies with over 10,000 users on Relay. Among its enterprise customers, Relay maintains 99 percent gross revenue retention and 130 percent net revenue retention.

Relay's growth has also earned consistent market recognition. The company has appeared on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for three consecutive years and was recently named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America (#830) for the third consecutive year.

About Relay

Relay is the system of action for physical operations, serving the 80 percent of the world's workforce that doesn't sit behind a desk - the frontlines. Relay captures what the frontline says and does, and turns it into action in the systems they already run, helping teams unlock operational intelligence and improve their communications, safety, and productivity. Relay's system combines its powerful software and AI platform with purpose-built next-gen hardware, to better connect frontline teams, overcome language barriers with support for 35 languages, and deliver rapid ROI for its customers. Relay is used by nearly 10 percent of the Fortune 500, and processes over one billion data points weekly from the nearly 10,000 sites it's deployed across in sectors like manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare, and more. For more information, visit relaypro.com.

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Q&A

Where does critical operational communication happen in manufacturing facilities?

Critical information moves through verbal conversations because of the speed and physical demands of frontline work, where gloves defeat touchscreens, noise defeats phones, and there is no desk. In fact, Relay found 82% of manufacturing professionals still relay information manually. While written records matter, they hold the closure rather than the human context behind it, so the challenge is capturing that spoken information before it disappears once the conversation ends.

Why do manufacturers still need frontline context after digitizing their operations?

Digital systems show what changed, but workers understand why, and bringing that frontline context into the operational record links machine data to what actually happened on the shift. Relay customer data found roughly 80% of what happens on a floor is never recorded anywhere, even in operations that bought purpose-built software for the job. As experienced people retire and AI reaches the floor, that context becomes not a complement to machine data, but what makes it interpretable.

How can manufacturers ensure critical context and data are being saved?

The practical first step is to find out how much is being lost today. Every operation has an Evaporation Rate, the share of its spoken reality that never reaches the right person in time to act, and most have never measured theirs. Voice-based communication tools that let workers talk naturally while automatically converting those conversations into structured, searchable records address this gap. Relay's approach preserves the speed factory workers need while ensuring the context behind an issue or update doesn't disappear once the conversation ends.

¹ Survey of 500 U.S. manufacturing professionals at organizations with 500 or more employees, conducted by Dynata on behalf of Relay, August 2026.

SOURCE Relay Inc.