Perspectives on the future of travel & technology.

Thayer Investment Partners is thrilled to participate in Relay's $36 million funding round, led by International Paper alongside new investors including clients of Cerity Partners and Harmonic Growth Partners. Earlier lead investors G2 Venture Partners and Wind River Ventures also increased their investments in the significantly oversubscribed round, which brings Relay's total capital raised to more than $90 million.

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. Workers keep communicating the way they have for decades — pick up a radio, wear it during a shift, and push to talk — while a system behind that familiar interaction combines cloud communications, AI, real-time translation across 35 languages, location awareness, and automated workflows, all delivered on purpose-built, durable hardware. The company serves hundreds of thousands of frontline workers across nearly 10,000 sites and works with approximately 10 percent of the Fortune 500, and it reports 99 percent gross revenue retention and 130 percent net revenue retention among its enterprise customers.

“Thayer has a unique vantage point on hospitality technology, as our investment partners represent many of the world's leading hospitality companies. 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.”

— Chris Hemmeter, Managing Partner, Thayer Investment Partners

The investor mix tells the story. International Paper invested as a customer that has watched Relay deliver clear communications in extremely loud industrial environments, and Thayer brings the perspective of multiple leading hotel brands that already run Relay across thousands of properties. As Relay CEO and Co-Founder Chris Chuang put it, "It's a powerful endorsement when customers aren't just buying your system but are also betting on the company behind it."

The opportunity is rooted in what Relay calls signal evaporation: in the company's survey of 500 U.S. manufacturing professionals, 57 percent said their most important operational communication happens out loud, and only 17 percent said almost everything frontline workers notice ends up in a system or report. The new capital will go toward Relay's AI platform, including an insights and agentic layer that lets teams query their shift data and act on it, along with worker safety solutions, enterprise integrations, next-generation hardware, and expansion across industrial and hospitality markets.

Hospitality runs on people who are on their feet, on the move, and focused on a guest, not a screen, which is why a voice-first approach resonates so strongly with the hospitality brands we partner with. We're proud to back Chris Chuang and the Relay team as they bring the intelligence of the frontline into the systems that run physical operations. Read the entire announcement at PR Newswire.

We congratulate the HyperGuest team on a $25 million investment from AMI, the mid-market investment arm of Apax Partners. The funding will accelerate the international growth of a company we are proud to count in our portfolio, and fund continued investment in a technology platform built for a moment when AI is reshaping how travelers find and book hotels.

Founded in 2020, HyperGuest builds the infrastructure that lets hotels and travel companies — booking sites, agencies, tour operators, AI agents, and travel-tech firms — connect and work directly with one another, without a separate technical integration for every new commercial partnership. Today the platform connects tens of thousands of hotels with thousands of travel companies and technology providers worldwide, and it recently surpassed $1 billion in cumulative transaction volume. HyperGuest employs roughly 160 people across 21 countries, and PhocusWire named it one of its Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2025.

“We built HyperGuest around a simple idea: Hotels and travel companies should be able to work together directly, quickly and at scale. This investment is a major milestone and will help us accelerate our ambition to transform hotel commerce globally.”

— Nir Yaron, Co-Founder & CEO, HyperGuest

The timing reflects where distribution is heading. Yaron describes AI as "a tectonic shift" for the category: large language models can search and recommend on a traveler's behalf, but they "require data input," and the structured, reliable hotel inventory and rates that HyperGuest was built to supply is precisely that input. As discovery moves toward chat interfaces, the infrastructure feeding those models becomes the layer that matters. Zehavit Cohen, a partner at Apax Partners, said HyperGuest "is solving one of hospitality's fundamental challenges with differentiated technology and impressive momentum."

B2B hotel distribution has long been fragmented, with hotels, bedbanks, and travel companies forced through intermediaries or one-off integrations. We believe the next generation of travel commerce will run on direct, programmatic connections between hotels and every channel that sells them, human or AI, and that HyperGuest is building the connective tissue to make it possible. We're proud to continue supporting Nir Yaron and the entire HyperGuest team as they scale. Read the entire announcement at Dealroom.

We congratulate BoomPop, a company we backed in its $41 million funding round in November 2025, on its acquisition by Navan, the global AI-powered business travel and expense platform. The deal folds BoomPop's AI-native event-planning software directly into Navan, giving customers a single home for travel, expense, payments, meetings, and events.

Started in 2023, BoomPop uses AI to handle event planning end to end — venue and vendor sourcing, room blocks, contracts, and payments — turning work that used to take teams weeks into minutes. The platform has supported events for roughly 250,000 people at companies including Accenture, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Shopify, and BoomPop estimates it has cut customers' event costs by about 30% on average, across gatherings ranging from 15-person offsites to conferences with thousands of attendees. Inc. has recognized BoomPop as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America.

“We built BoomPop to make work functions less work, and our partnership with Navan showed us how much bigger that idea gets when travel and events live together. Our customers saw the value of our combined offering immediately and we're just getting started. Joining forces means every company gets one partner for the whole thing, from a ten-person offsite to a 500-person global sales kickoff.”

— Healey Cypher, Co-Founder & CEO, BoomPop

The acquisition builds on a partnership between the two companies announced earlier this year, and gives Navan — which has also acquired Reed & Mackay, Comtravo, Tripeur, and Smartrips — a foothold in a category where, by its own estimate, most meetings and events spend still happens outside any managed platform. Terms were not disclosed, and Navan said the deal is not expected to have a material impact on its previously issued guidance.

We backed BoomPop because we believed the same AI-native approach reshaping travel booking was overdue in corporate events, a category too often left to spreadsheets, email chains, and tribal knowledge. Being absorbed into a platform the scale of Navan is exactly the kind of outcome we look for when we back a small team solving a large, underserved problem: the product gets bigger distribution, the team gets more resources to build, and the customers who already depend on BoomPop get a more connected experience. We're proud of what Healey and the BoomPop team have built, and we'll be watching closely as their technology scales inside Navan. Read the entire announcement at BusinessWire.