Relay Raises $36M for Frontline Operational Intelligence

International Paper is leading a $36M investment in Relay, one of the frontline-technology vendors already working inside the industrial environments the packaging company knows best. Relay announced the financing on September 30, 2026, with new capital from clients of Cerity Partners, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Thayer Investment Partners. Existing investors G2 Venture Partners and Wind River Ventures also increased their investments.

The Raleigh company says the round brings its total capital raised above $90M. Relay did not disclose a formal round label or current valuation, which makes the lead investor more informative than a label would have been: International Paper is moving from customer evidence to capital commitment while Relay tries to turn voice, location, and shift activity into usable operational intelligence.

What Happened

Relay's September 30 announcement describes a significantly oversubscribed $36M financing. International Paper led the investment, while Cerity Partners clients, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Thayer Investment Partners joined as new investors. G2 Venture Partners, which led Relay's 2024 Series B, and Wind River Ventures put in additional capital.

Relay says the money will expand its software and AI platform, including an insights and agentic layer that will let teams query shift data and act on it. The plan also covers worker-safety capabilities, integrations with enterprise systems, next-generation frontline hardware, expansion across industrial and hospitality markets, and hiring in product and go-to-market roles. Axios Raleigh reports that Relay has about 300 employees and expects to add roughly 100 people over the next year.

The Product Starts Where Screens Become Awkward

Relay builds a familiar push-to-talk experience around connected hardware, cloud communications, real-time translation, location awareness, safety alerts, automated workflows, and integrations. That combination matters in factories, hotels, hospitals, casinos, warehouses, and other environments where a worker may be moving, wearing gloves, responding to noise, or handling a problem that will not wait for a form to load.

The company's argument is that enterprise software has digitized plenty of management work while leaving frontline context trapped in speech. Relay's survey of 500 U.S. manufacturing professionals, conducted by Dynata, found that 57% said their most important operational communication happens aloud and in person. Only 17% said almost everything workers notice and flag reaches a system, log, or formal report, while 79% said communication breakdowns cause delays, rework, or missed handoffs at least a few times each month. Those figures are company-sponsored research, but they frame the workflow Relay is trying to own.

Relay gives workers the behavior they already understand, then tries to make the exhaust useful. A radio message can become a translated communication, a safety record, a location-aware alert, or structured shift data that managers and software systems can revisit. The financing is aimed at pushing that design further, especially through an AI layer that can answer questions about shift activity and connect the answer to an action.

Why a Customer-Led Round Matters

International Paper is not approaching Relay as an investor learning the product from a deck. Keith Townsend, Group Vice President for Packaging Solutions North America, said in the funding release that Relay had delivered dependable communication in loud industrial environments and helped improve shift transitions, operating processes, safety responses, maintenance alerts, and connections into operational systems.

That does not turn one customer's experience into universal proof, but it changes the investment logic. A corporate customer can bring requirements, deployment friction, procurement knowledge, integration needs, and operational consequences into the capital relationship. Relay gets money from an organization that understands what happens when communication technology fails during physical work, and International Paper gets a closer seat at a vendor it considers part of a modern industrial stack.

The rest of the syndicate broadens that market signal. Thayer brings hospitality relationships, while Harmonic specializes in expansion-stage companies and Cerity's venture practice works with corporate investment programs. Returning investors G2 and Wind River are backing another phase after Relay's $13M Series A in 2023 and $35M Series B in 2024.

Scale Has Moved the Assignment

Relay says its platform now reaches hundreds of thousands of frontline workers, nearly 10% of the Fortune 500, and almost 10,000 sites. The company reports processing more than 1B data points each week, supporting 35 languages, and maintaining 99% gross revenue retention and 130% net revenue retention among enterprise customers. These metrics have not been independently audited in the sources reviewed, but they describe a business whose challenge is moving beyond device replacement.

Chris Chuang, Relay's CEO and co-founder, is positioning the company as a system of action for physical operations. The phrase earns its meaning only if Relay can connect a worker's fast, spoken observation to a reliable record and then to the enterprise system where maintenance, staffing, safety, or production decisions are made. Hardware durability, network reliability, translation quality, permissions, data governance, and integration depth all sit inside that promise.

What the $36M Has to Prove

The easy version of the story is that AI is finally reaching frontline workers. The harder and more useful version is that Relay must preserve the speed and simplicity of a radio while adding enough structure for software to understand what happened without creating more work for the person holding the device.

International Paper's participation gives Relay a demanding place to keep testing that proposition. As the company adds people, hardware, integrations, and an agentic layer, its most important output will not be the number of conversations captured. It will be whether a spoken warning, handoff, repair note, or safety signal reaches the right system soon enough to change the shift that produced it.