In 1940, engineers at Galvin Manufacturing, the company that would become Motorola, built a handheld two-way radio for the U.S. Army. Soldiers called it the Handie-Talkie. You pressed a button, you talked, you let go.
Eighty-six years later, that’s still how a hotel housekeeper, a paper mill operator and a hospital transport tech reach the person they need. Radios got smaller, lighter and digital. The button never changed.
Relay’s bet is that the button is the point.
The Raleigh, N.C. company said Tuesday it has raised $36 million in new funding, led by International Paper, bringing its total capital raised to more than $90 million. The money will go toward scaling a system that turns the frontline worker’s radio into an artificial intelligence assistant without asking that worker to do one thing differently. Pick it up, wear it for the shift, push to talk. Behind the button, what gets said is transcribed, translated, routed to the right person or system, logged and turned into action.
The round was significantly oversubscribed. Cerity Partners Ventures joined as a new investor. Its parent, Cerity Partners, is a wealth and investment management firm with more than $150 billion in assets under management, and the ventures arm manages venture investments for Fortune 500 companies. G2 Venture Partners, which led an earlier round, put in more.
Chris Chuang, Relay’s CEO and co-founder, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster the money mattered less than who wrote the checks. “What makes this round special isn’t simply the capital being raised,” he said. “It’s the alignment with leaders from the industries we serve on how Relay can help them digitally transform their physical operations.”
It Started as a Walkie-Talkie for Kids
Chuang didn’t set out to build enterprise software, he told Webster.
In 2014, as CEO of Republic Wireless, the Raleigh mobile carrier, he put a small team on a problem parents had. How to give a young kid a way to reach them without handing over a smartphone. The answer, launched in 2018, was Relay. A screenless square about the size of a drink coaster. One button. LTE and Wi-Fi so it worked anywhere a phone did. GPS on the back end. A companion app on the parent’s phone. Two of them cost $149.
Then, Chuang told Webster, the orders started coming in 500 at a time.
Businesses had found it. The things that made Relay work for a 7-year-old made it work for a frontline worker. No screen to break, nothing to learn, nothing to configure, a device that survives a drop and a downpour and reaches the other side of a building or the other side of the country the same way. Chuang followed the orders. Republic Wireless eventually sold its consumer phone business, and Relay became the company.
That origin story explains more about the product than any feature list does. Relay was designed for someone who couldn’t be trained and wouldn’t read a manual. It turns out that’s also the design brief for the 80% of the world’s workforce that doesn’t sit behind a desk.
The Routine Stays the Same, and That’s the Whole Idea
Author Charles Duhigg’s “cue, routine, reward loop” is a useful way to see what Relay is doing. Something happens on the floor: a line jams, a guest needs towels, a patient needs moving. That’s the cue. The routine is reaching for the radio. The reward is a human voice coming back.
Companies have invested billions digitizing physical operations. Most of it went into tools designed for the desk, and the frontline doesn’t work at a desk. These are the people who run production lines, maintain equipment, clean hotel rooms, care for patients, respond to emergencies and keep complex facilities running. Stopping to enter data on a screen is incompatible with most of that work and, in some cases, dangerous.
So most enterprise technology built for the frontline tries to change the routine. It asks the worker to stop, find a tablet, log in and type. The routine doesn’t take, because the worker is wearing gloves, or standing next to a machine that’s louder than a jet engine, or holding a patient. The data doesn’t get entered, the system stays empty, and the company concludes that frontline workers are hard to digitize.
Relay leaves the routine alone and changes what happens after the button is released. Behind the familiar push-to-talk sits cloud communications, AI, real-time translation across 35 languages, location awareness and automated workflows, all packaged in durable hardware built to take the abuse of a plant floor or a hotel’s back of house. Chuang told Webster it deploys in a single shift, which is only possible because there’s nothing to teach.
Chuang calls the whole thing a system of action for physical operations. It’s a mouthful, but the distinction he drew for Webster matters. A system of record stores what workers type after the fact. A system of action does something with what they say while they’re saying it.
The Most Valuable Operational Data Is Spoken, and Then It’s Gone
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The enterprise systems that run physical operations, the maintenance system, the property management system at the hotel, are built to capture what gets typed or logged. They digitize workflows, and they do that well. The problem, Chuang told Webster, is that the frontline doesn’t type. Some of the most valuable operational knowledge in a building lives in what gets said over the radio, and none of those systems can hear it.
Relay’s own research on 500 manufacturing professionals found that 57% say their most important operational communication happens out loud, in person. Only about half of what workers notice and flag ever makes it into a formal reporting system. The rest disappears the moment it’s spoken into an analog radio. Relay calls that signal evaporation, and it has a cost: 62% say communication breakdowns cause delays, rework or missed handoffs at least a few times a month.
That’s the gap Relay is going after. The knowledge that matters most in a plant or a hotel or a hospital already lives in the radio traffic. Nobody was writing it down because nobody could.
The Lead Investor Is Also a Customer
International Paper is a Fortune 500 packaging manufacturer with more than 125 years of operating experience, and it’s leading the round after using Relay inside its own mills. That’s the part Chuang kept coming back to in his conversation with Webster.
“International Paper understands Relay not just from an investor standpoint, but from the perspective of a customer witnessing the value Relay delivers across its highly demanding industrial environments,” he said.
“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, at International Paper. “Relay has proven it can deliver clear, dependable communications in extremely loud and challenging industrial environments.”
Townsend said the system goes beyond communications to improve shift transitions, strengthen operating processes, speed up responses to safety and maintenance alerts, and connect what frontline workers see into the company’s operational systems. “We invested because we envision Relay as an important part of our modern industrial technology stack.”
Chuang put it this way to Webster: “It’s a powerful endorsement when customers aren’t just buying your system but are also betting on the company behind it.”
The Numbers Say the Bet on Behavior Is Paying Off
Relay now serves hundreds of thousands of frontline workers and works with roughly 10% of the Fortune 500, including several companies with more than 10,000 users on the platform. All of the top 10 North American hotel brands use it. It’s deployed at nearly 10,000 sites across manufacturing, hospitality and healthcare, and processes more than a billion data points a week.
Among enterprise customers, gross revenue retention is 99% and net revenue retention is 130%. Companies that buy Relay keep it and buy more of it. That’s what you’d expect from a product workers don’t have to be talked into using.
Chuang told Webster that as enterprises pour money into automation and AI, the advantage will go to the companies that can link machine intelligence with the knowledge of the people doing the physical work. Relay wants to be that link. The new funding is aimed at it: The software and AI platform, worker safety solutions, integrations with other enterprise systems, next-generation frontline hardware, expansion across the industrial and hospitality markets, and growth of the product and go-to-market teams.
The Handie-Talkie’s designers got the interaction right on the first try, and nobody has improved on it since. Relay’s insight was to stop trying. Leave the button where it is and put the intelligence where the worker never has to see it.
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