Relay, a provider of technology for physical operations and frontline workers, has raised $36 million in new funding, bringing its total capital raised to more than $90 million.
The latest round was led by International Paper, with participation from new investors including clients of Cerity Partners, Harmonic Growth Partners, and Thayer Investment Partners. Existing lead investors G2 Venture Partners and Wind River Ventures also increased their investments.
Relay plans to use the new funding to expand its software and AI platform, including its insights and agentic capabilities that will allow organizations to query shift data and take action based on it.
The company will also invest in worker safety solutions, enterprise integrations, next-generation frontline hardware, and expansion across industrial and hospitality markets.
Relay also plans to continue hiring across its product and go-to-market teams.
Relay focuses on workers in physical environments, including manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare and other industries.
Frontline employees often operate production lines, maintain equipment, clean hotel rooms, care for patients and manage facilities. Many of these jobs make it difficult to regularly interact with screens or traditional workplace software.
Relay’s system allows workers to continue using a push-to-talk radio during their shifts while connecting their communications with cloud software, AI, real-time translation, location awareness and automated workflows.
Relay says much of the operational knowledge created by frontline employees is communicated verbally rather than recorded in traditional systems such as manufacturing execution, maintenance or property management software.
In a survey of 500 manufacturing professionals, Relay found that 57% said their most important operational communication happens verbally and in person. Only 17% said almost everything frontline workers notice and report ends up in a formal system, log or report.
Relay refers to the information that is lost between verbal communication and digital systems as “signal evaporation.”
The company said 62% of respondents reported that communication breakdowns cause delays, rework or missed handoffs at least several times a month.
Relay currently serves hundreds of thousands of frontline workers and works with approximately 10% of Fortune 500 companies.
The company said some enterprise customers have more than 10,000 users on its platform. Relay reports 99% gross revenue retention and 130% net revenue retention among its enterprise customers.
The platform is deployed across nearly 10,000 sites and processes more than one billion data points each week.
Relay also supports frontline communication in 35 languages, helping companies address multilingual workplace environments.
Relay believes the combination of AI and frontline knowledge will become increasingly important as companies invest in automation and digital transformation.
With more than $90 million in total capital raised, the company plans to continue developing technology that connects frontline workers, enterprise software and AI while expanding its presence across industrial and hospitality markets.
