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.