Relay Solidifies Role as the Intelligent System of Action for the Physical Economy with 461% Growth and Strategic C-Suite Expansion

Relay, the Intelligent System of Action, ranks #175 on Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ and #920 on Inc. 5000; adds IPO-veteran leadership to accelerate the digitization of the physical economy.

RALEIGH, N.C., Jan. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Relay, the cloud-based platform transforming frontline operations, today announced a landmark year of hyper-growth. Establishing itself as the Intelligent System of Action for the physical economy, Relay gives a voice to the 80% of the workforce left behind by the digital revolution. Propelled by a staggering 461% three-year revenue growth rate, Relay secured the No. 175 spot on the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, ranking among the fastest-growing technology companies in North America. This explosive trajectory was further validated by a No. 920 ranking on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America.

From Dumb Pipes to Operational Intelligence: The "Human Signal" Data Engine

Relay's rapid ascent is fueled by the urgent mandate that the frontline needs to operate differently - a transformation Relay is actively engineering. The Relay SOAR™ Platform has liberated the frontline from the inefficiencies of the analog past, replacing Big Radio's "dumb pipes" to transform ephemeral voice conversations and location information into a structured, searchable, and actionable data asset. This shift has created one of the world's largest datasets of industrial ground truth, creating over 1 billion new data points each week. This data is driving meaningful outcomes for Relay customers, with over 78% of all new industrial customers adopting AI features such as Relay's award-winning TeamTranslate™.

"Our explosive growth over the last three years is a mandate from the market," said Chris Chuang, CEO of Relay. "The global deskless workforce has been starved of innovation for too long, relying on 20th century tools to solve 21st century problems. We aren't just selling radios; we are building the Intelligent System of Action for the physical economy. By turning disconnected tasks into intelligent orchestration, we are empowering teams - from industrial manufacturing to hospitality - to move from reactive chaos to proactive control, ultimately enabling their productivity and safety to soar."

Data-Driven Innovation & Scale

The operational intelligence fueling the Relay SOAR Platform has enabled the company to innovate at a pace legacy competitors cannot match, resulting in massive market adoption in 2025:

• Product Advancements: Building on the success of TeamTranslate, Relay released an advanced AI channel scanning and reporting platform. This feature moves beyond simple communication to proactive orchestration, allowing managers to monitor multiple operational streams simultaneously and instantly digest complex shift and incident data without manual reporting. In addition, Relay launched 32 new software features across 24 software releases in 2025.
• Enterprise Adoption and Customer Expansion: Relay now has over 40 of the Fortune 500 as customers, and a dozen of the Fortune 100. Additionally, 47% of Relay's revenue now comes from $100K+ ARR customers. Relay continues to demonstrate extremely strong customer value with an NRR of over 135% among these enterprise customers.
• Unlocking the Diverse Global Workforce: From its efforts to eliminate language barriers for frontline teams, Relay has seen a 500%+ YoY increase in TeamTranslate usage, instantly breaking down language barriers in real time across increasingly diverse teams and amplifying the Human Signal™ regardless of native tongue.
• Strategic Market Expansion: The launch of RelayM marked a significant expansion of the platform's addressable market. By packing full enterprise ruggedness (MIL-STD-810H) and intelligence into a device 35% smaller and lighter, Relay accelerated its expansion within "front-of-house" luxury and healthcare sectors that previously rejected bulky legacy radios, proving that industrial-grade durability can exist in a discreet, modern, wearable form factor.
• Enterprise Reliability: The launch of Fleet Shield™, an AI-enabled lifecycle management program, has ended the era of "disposable frontline tech" and driven record enterprise renewals, as it helps deliver the operational uptime along with predictable budgeting frontline businesses need.
• IP Expansion: Relay expanded its intellectual property portfolio this year, securing its 100th patent. With 11 new patents awarded in 2025 alone, the portfolio now covers critical innovations in seamless connectivity switching, AI-driven noise suppression, language translation, and advanced location tracking – all innovations that are rendering the static hardware portfolios of "Big Radio" obsolete in a cloud-first world. This milestone marks a definitive step in Relay's transition from a device manufacturer to an Intelligent System of Action, establishing the technical foundation required to digitize the physical world.

Industry Recognition

Relay's ability to turn talk into action earned significant accolades in 2025:

• Deloitte Technology Fast 500: Ranked #175 in North America and #3 in fastest growing communications companies.
• Inc. 5000: Ranked #920 among America's fastest-growing private companies, and #39 among $25M+ all "Tech/ Telecom" companies.
• Fast Company World Changing Ideas: Honored for TeamTranslate.
• The Software Report: Named to The Top 50 Software Companies of 2025.
• EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2025 Southeast: CEO Chris Chuang recognized as a Winner for transformative leadership, and ranking him amongst the Top 200 EY Entrepreneurs in their national competition.

Strategic Executive Expansion

To help manage growth and engineer the transition from startup to enterprise standard, Relay has bolstered its C-Suite with two key appointments from high-velocity tech environments:

• Matthew Welch joins as Chief Marketing Officer. Welch's background includes a history of driving rapid market adoption for hardware-enabled software platforms. He was previously the COO at Lighthouse AI (acquired by Apple), where he spearheaded go-to-market strategy and execution. He also served as Chief Business Officer at Eargo, where he built the commercial side of the company from the ground up and led a cross-functional organization spanning marketing, sales, software engineering, data science, and customer success. These efforts transformed a physical device into a high-growth company that disrupted the hearing aid industry and culminated in a NASDAQ IPO in 2020. Before that, as General Manager of Kobo (acquired by Rakuten), he managed the global content P&L along with marketing, customer service, and data science, growing content revenue over 200% and scaling the business to over 12 million customers globally. Prior to this, Welch served in multiple marketing leadership roles, including CMO of Match.com International and VP Marketing at Madison Square Garden, as well as working at leading agencies like Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam. Welch holds a B.A. from Georgetown University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
• Shiv Hira joins as Chief Financial Officer. Hira brings more than 20 years of financial leadership experience and expertise scaling high-growth technology companies, most recently serving as Executive Senior Vice President of Finance at Bandwidth (NASDAQ:BAND), where he led global finance and was instrumental in the company's IPO, raised over $1 billion in debt and equity capital, and led a major acquisition that expanded the business globally across 60+ countries. Hira also brings operational experience as an early hire of a newly formed Pricing & Promotion Strategy team at Time Warner Cable that re-engineered pricing architecture to drive $1B in annual revenue across a 9 million customer base. Hira began his career in J.P. Morgan's investment banking division and holds an M.B.A from NYU's Stern School of Business and a B.B.A from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. At Relay, Hira oversees all financial strategy and operations to drive efficient growth and scale, and help prepare Relay for a potential public offering in the future.

"Matt and Shiv join us at a pivotal inflection point," added Chuang. "Their combined experience in scaling disruptive technology companies through rapid growth and to IPO scale is exactly what Relay needs. We have proven Relay's product-market fit; now, with these key additional senior executives joining our already strong and deep leadership team, we are ready to scale our business to the next level."

About Relay

Relay is the Intelligent System of Action for the frontline, bridging the gap between digital strategy and analog frontline reality to orchestrate the enterprise's final frontier: the human workflow. To build the necessary foundation, we transformed the traditional radio from a static brick into an intelligent wearable sensor embedded within our rugged next-generation hardware. This allows Relay to capture the Ground Truth that no one else can, treating voice and movement as the new keyboards of the enterprise. By capturing this Human Signal - institutional knowledge previously lost to the wind - we turn ephemeral talk and operational fixes into structured, searchable data assets. This collective intelligence unlocks the enterprise's most valuable untapped dataset - the real-time voice and actions of the workforce - to drive safety, efficiency, and ROI. Through the seamless integration of communication and operation where Voice equals Action, Relay proves that in the age of AI, the most powerful innovation is one that is defiantly human. For more information, visit www.relaypro.com.

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SOURCE Relay Inc.