(Relay: Raleigh, N.C.) -- Relay, the system of action for physical operations, announced it has raised $36 million in new funding, bringing total capital raised to over $90 million. Relay’s latest funding round, which was significantly oversubscribed, represents a powerful alignment among industry leaders with Relay’s vision for the future of frontline work, one that’s safer, better connected, and empowered with the spoken intelligence of its workers.

As a strong signal of Relay’s growing leadership in helping industrial companies digitally transform their operations, the round was led by International Paper, a Fortune 500 leader in sustainable packaging solutions with more than 125 years of manufacturing experience. Other new investors include Cerity Partners, a nationally recognized wealth management and investment management firm with more than $150 billion in assets under management-serving institutions, business owners, and individuals. Cerity Partner Ventures manages venture investments for Fortune 500 companies. Earlier lead investor G2 Venture Partners also increased their investments in this round.

“What makes this round special isn’t simply the capital being raised—it’s the alignment with leaders from the industries we serve on how Relay can help them digitally transform their physical operations,” says Chris Chuang, CEO and co-founder of Relay. “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. It’s a powerful endorsement when customers aren’t just buying your system but are also betting on the company behind it.”

Earning the right to serve the front lines

Companies have invested billions digitizing physical operations, yet frontline workers remain underserved with analog tools or technology designed for the desk rather than the harsher realities of physical operations. Frontline teams operate production lines, maintain equipment, clean hotel rooms, care for patients, respond to emergencies, and keep complex facilities running—activities that are often incompatible, and sometimes dangerous, with interaction and entering data on a screen.

Some of the most valuable operational knowledge lives in what workers say over their radios, not what’s typed or logged into MES, CMS, PMS, or other static reporting systems built to digitize workflows. In fact, according to research from Relay of 500 manufacturing professionals, 57% say their most important operational communication happens out loud, in person. At the same time, only about half of what workers notice and flag makes it into a formal reporting system. The rest disappears as soon as it’s spoken into traditional analog radios, a condition Relay calls signal evaporation. That gap has a meaningful cost, with 62% saying communication breakdowns cause delays, rework, or missed handoffs at least a few times a month.

With Relay, workers continue doing what they’ve done for decades—pick up a radio, wear it during their shift, and push to talk. But behind that familiar interaction is a robust system that combines the power of cloud communications, AI, real-time translation, location awareness, and automated workflows, all packaged in modern, durable, next-generation hardware built for the front lines.

“We run complex and demanding industrial operations, where strong communications isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s foundational,” says Keith Townsend, group vice president of packaging solutions, North America, International Paper. “Relay has proven it can deliver clear, dependable communications in extremely loud and challenging industrial environments. Relay goes beyond communications to improve shift transitions, strengthen operating processes, accelerate responses to safety and maintenance alerts, and connect frontline insights into operational systems. We invested because we envision Relay as an important part of our modern industrial technology stack.”

Accelerating the next chapter

As enterprises accelerate investments in automation and AI, Relay believes competitive advantage will increasingly depend on how effectively organizations link machine intelligence with the knowledge of the people driving the physical actions required in their operations. Relay can help bridge that gap.

The new funding will accelerate Relay’s software and AI platform capabilities, worker safety solutions, integrations with other enterprise systems, next-generation frontline hardware, expansion across the industrial and hospitality markets, and continued growth of its product and GTM teams.

Relay now serves hundreds of thousands of frontline workers and works with approximately 10% of the Fortune 500, including multiple companies with more than 10,000 users on Relay. Among its enterprise customers, Relay maintains 99% gross revenue retention and 130% net revenue retention.

Relay’s growth has also earned consistent market recognition. The company has appeared on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for three consecutive years and was recently named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America (No. 830) for the third consecutive year.