The business communications startup Relay Inc. says it’s trying to capture “frontline intelligence” for enterprises after raising $36 million in funding, bringing its total amount raised so far to more than $90 million.

Today’s round was led by the industrial manufacturing giant International Paper Co. and saw participation from the wealth management firm Cerity Partners Ventures and existing backer G2 Ventures.

Relay is the developer of a cloud-hosted smart radio communications system that now wants to bring the artificial intelligence revolution to workforces who don’t sit at desks in front of a computer all day. Its technology is designed for frontline workers who spend the bulk of their shifts on their feet, whether that’s operating production lines in factories, cleaning hotel rooms, caring for patients, responding to emergencies, pushing trolleys around a supermarket or something else.

For many of these kinds of workers, Relay’s smart radio system is the primary interface for organizing their daily work. They’ll use its radios to report back to their supervisor, provide critical updates, report problems and so on.

Relay says that much of the most valuable operational knowledge at these kinds of businesses is communicated over the radio waves – and most of it stays there. Frontline workers are usually too busy to enter this data into a computer, and that means almost half of it is never recorded by anyone. It simply disappears after it has been spoken.

Evaporating signals

Co-founder and Chief Executive Chris Chuang calls this problem “signal evaporation,” and says it can have a real impact on a businesses’s finances, leading to missed handoffs, rework and expensive operational delays. “Signal evaporation occurs because of the way human cognition works,” he explained. “With traditional systems of record, workers are asked to record the details of what happened, sometimes hours after they’re removed from the specific task or incident they’re reporting. The information is subject to recall and interpretation, and can therefore be incomplete or inaccurate, if it’s recorded at all.”

That’s why Chuang believes businesses can gain a significant competitive advantage by using AI to capture what their frontline workers say in real time, so they don’t have to record them after the fact, and he intends to help them do just that. Relay has developed a voice AI system that integrates with its smart radio platform to capture worker’s conversations as they use their handheld radios to communicate, transforming those words into structured and queryable data that can feed into operational workflows and generate useful insights that improve business efficiency. It understands domain-specific jargon, and that helps to ensure critical safety issues and maintenance requests never get lost in the noise of day to day work.

Chuang offered the example of someone working in a warehouse who reports over the radio that “the palletizer has broken down three times this week.” Many AI tools might struggle to understand the word “palletizer” and confuse it for a word like “appetizer,” but not Relay. Because it’s trained on the relevant jargon, it will understand there is a recurring glitch with the machine that stacks goods onto pallets ready for shipping, and it will automatically create a work order ticket to get it fixed.

“As the problem is fixed, the technician can speak into Relay the details of what they’ve found and the steps they’re taking to address it,” Chuang explained. “This is then structured and becomes part of the documented record. As a result, root cause analysis is streamlined and unplanned downtime is reduced, closing the gap between what’s spoken on the line and stored in a traditional CMMS.”

Relay’s AI system can also translate conversations for multilingual teams. The company has developed a TeamTranslate capability, which provides real-time voice translation in more than 30 languages to help diverse teams get around any language barriers. Workers speak in their native language, and TeamTranslate will automatically relay what they’re saying in the receiver’s own language to enable seamless over-the-radio communication.

A goldmine of data

“A lot of our customers never realized how much of their business operations were never formally recorded,” Chuang said. “We’ve seen official logs at major manufacturers capture only about one in four equipment stoppages. Everything else stays in the live discussions over radio and in people’s memories. In a loud, fast-moving manufacturing plant, much of it gets lost before someone is able to record it.”

In another example, workers at a food processing facility would often use their Relay radios to discuss a broken water pump that was functioning poorly, yet despite all of the grumbling and disruption it caused, no one got around to creating a record, and so no maintenance order was filed in the computerized maintenance management system, Chuang related.

“Eventually, the maintenance manager spotted this while looking through the Relay transcripts and realized the pump needed to be replaced,” he recalled. “But his directors weren’t convinced that the issue was real, and didn’t want to spend $75,000 on a replacement water pump. Relay provided the evidence needed that no other system of record held, and the issue was dealt with as planned downtime rather than an unplanned catastrophe.”

International Paper decided to lead today’s round after seeing the benefits of Relay’s technology with its own eyes. According to Keith Townsent, group vice president of Packaging Solutions North America at International Paper, reliable communication is invaluable when it comes to the complex industrial operations his company performs.

“Relay has proven it can deliver clear, dependable communications in extremely loud and challenging industrial environments,” he said. “It goes beyond communications to improve shift transitions, strengthen operating processes, accelerate responses to safety and maintenance alerts and connect frontline insights into operational systems.”

Chuang said the backing of one of its major customers is the strongest validation of its technology that it could hope for. “What makes this round special isn’t the capital being raised,” he said. “It’s the alignment with leaders from the industries we serve on how Relay can help them digitally transform physical operations. It’s a powerful endorsement when customers aren’t just buying your system but also betting on the company behind it.”

The startup plans to use the money to accelerate the development of its AI capabilities and worker safety systems while deepening its integrations with other enterprise platforms. It’s also looking at developing new kinds of hardware for frontline worker communications as it eyes expansion across the industrial and hospitality sectors.

Photo: Relay