Relay.app
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Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
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Review status
Source-backed
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v1 · 1,879 words
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Relay.app is a workflow-automation platform that lets teams build multi-step automations across the software they already use, with a distinctive emphasis on human-in-the-loop steps and built-in artificial intelligence. It is made by Relay, a San Francisco company founded in July 2021 by Jacob Bank, a former product director at Google who had earlier sold his startup Timeful to Google in 2015. Relay.app debuted in early access in October 2022 and launched publicly in October 2023, positioning itself as an alternative to Zapier and Make that goes "beyond triggers and actions" by weaving human judgment and large language model steps into otherwise automated processes. The company raised roughly $8.2 million in seed funding from investors including Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.
Relay was founded by Jacob Bank, who serves as chief executive. Bank holds a BA in computer science from Cornell University and was pursuing a PhD in the artificial intelligence lab at Stanford University before leaving to start a company. That company was Timeful, a smart-calendar application that combined behavioral psychology with AI to help people schedule their highest-priority work. Google acquired Timeful in 2015.
After the acquisition, Bank stayed at Google as a director of product management, where he led product teams for Gmail, Google Calendar, and other Google Workspace products and worked on integrating Timeful's technology into those tools. He left Google in July 2021 to found Relay. According to the company's own funding announcement, the founding team included product, design, and engineering leaders who had previously worked on Gmail and Google Calendar.
Relay is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and operates as a fully remote organization with staff across North America and Europe. The product is known publicly as Relay.app, while the company itself is referred to simply as Relay. The third-party data service GetLatka reported the company at roughly 27 employees and about $3 million in annual recurring revenue as of mid-2025, figures that have not been confirmed by Relay and should be read as a single external estimate.
Note on naming: several unrelated startups also operate under the name "Relay," including a Raleigh, North Carolina maker of frontline-worker communication devices and a London-based e-commerce delivery company, both of which raised separate, larger funding rounds in 2024 and 2025. Those companies are distinct from Jacob Bank's Relay.app and should not be conflated with it.
Relay's outside funding has consisted of two seed-stage rounds that together total roughly $8.2 million. The first was announced on October 11, 2022, when the company raised $5 million led by Khosla Ventures alongside its early-access launch. The second, a $3.1 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz, was announced on October 11, 2023, at the time of the public launch, bringing the cumulative total to about $8.1 million to $8.2 million.
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead investor | Other named investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| October 11, 2022 | Seed | $5 million | Khosla Ventures | Neo, BoxGroup, SV Angel, angel investors |
| October 11, 2023 | Seed (extension) | $3.1 million | Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) | (round announced at public launch) |
| Total | ~$8.2 million | Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Neo, BoxGroup, SV Angel, others |
At the time of the 2022 round, Khosla Ventures partner Sandhya Venkatachalam said that Relay's vision of "understanding the best practices of top-performing teams and creating assistive software to bring those workflows to everyone could transform the entire way people work," and noted that the firm had backed Bank before. Reporting on the 2023 round characterized Relay as sitting "somewhere between Zapier and Asana," targeting collaborative processes that mix automation with human coordination.
Relay.app is a no-code builder for automated workflows. A workflow is triggered by an event (for example, a new row in a spreadsheet, an incoming email, a form submission, a schedule, or a webhook) and then runs a predictable series of steps across connected applications. Workflows can be simple linear sequences or branching flows with conditional paths, loops, and data transformations. The platform is aimed at operations, sales, support, finance, and similar teams automating recurring work such as lead routing, meeting and onboarding coordination, executive updates, content repurposing, and customer communications.
What distinguishes Relay.app from a pure trigger-and-action tool is its founding premise that many real-world processes still require judgment, personalization, and discretion, so they should not be fully automated. The product is built around two ideas that follow from that premise: human-in-the-loop steps and native AI steps.
Human-in-the-loop steps let a workflow pause and pull in a person at any point that needs a decision. Common uses include requesting an approval before an action runs, collecting missing data through a form, assigning a task, or reviewing and editing the output of an AI step before it is sent. Relay markets these steps as native to the platform and available on all plans rather than bolted on through a third-party chat or ticketing tool, which the company frames as a core differentiator against competitors that implement approvals indirectly. The trade-off, noted by independent reviewers, is that in-workflow approvers generally need to be users inside the Relay workspace.
Relay.app embeds LLM-powered actions directly into workflows. Built-in AI steps cover tasks such as extracting structured data, classifying or categorizing inputs, summarizing text, and generating written content, with additional capabilities including translation, image generation, text-to-speech, and audio transcription. Early versions, around the 2023 launch, used ChatGPT for features the company branded as AI Autofill (suggesting or drafting content) and AI Classify (making conditional decisions). Over time the platform broadened to let users mix and match models from multiple providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), and Google (Gemini), among others, and to write custom AI steps with configurable prompts and output schemas. AI credits are included with each plan, and users can optionally supply their own API keys.
Relay has also moved toward AI agents. The platform lets users create small "mini agents" inside workflows that can make AI-driven decisions and trigger follow-up actions, and a broader Agents launch in February 2026 reframed the product around assembling a team of AI agents rather than only static automations. In July 2025 Relay added support for the Model Context Protocol, allowing users to create custom MCP servers, connect Relay agents to external MCP servers, and invoke external MCP tools from within workflows. The company has also added a chat-first building mode in which a user describes the desired automation in plain language and Relay constructs the workflow.
Relay.app connects to more than 200 applications through native integrations, spanning tools such as Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce, Airtable, Stripe, Asana, and Monday.com. The company emphasizes depth of integration over raw breadth, contrasting its 200-plus connectors with the much larger app catalogs of incumbents. Newer integrations the company has highlighted include Reddit, PandaDoc, Xero, HeyGen, Fathom, and SalesIntel.
Relay.app competes directly with established automation platforms, principally Zapier, and also Make, Microsoft Power Automate, n8n, and IFTTT. Relay frames itself as the "AI-native" option built for speed and simplicity, while describing Zapier as the long-established incumbent whose strength is an enormous integration ecosystem and enterprise reliability. The clearest contrasts the company draws are:
Independent comparisons generally agree that Relay's edge is its AI-native design and human-in-the-loop controls, while noting that Zapier and similar incumbents still lead on the sheer number of integrations (Zapier advertises support for several thousand apps) and on mature reliability for large, long-running automations. Some reviewers also observe that Relay's conditional-logic features can present a learning curve for users new to branching workflows.
Relay.app offers a tiered subscription with a free plan and published paid tiers.
| Plan | Price (per month) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Single user, limited steps, includes a starter allotment of AI credits |
| Professional | $38 | Single user, higher usage limits and more AI credits |
| Team | $138 | Up to 10 users, shared workflows and collaboration |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited users, SOC 2 and GDPR compliance, priority support, and options to run on private models via Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, or Microsoft Azure |
Additional AI credits can be purchased as add-ons, ranging from roughly $19 per month for 10,000 credits up to about $1,199 per month for 1,000,000 credits. Pricing is set by Relay and is subject to change.
Relay.app's public launch in October 2023 was covered by technology outlets including TechCrunch and VentureBeat, which framed the company as a former-Google founder taking aim at Zapier with a more AI- and human-centric take on automation. Coverage cited early customers using the product to remove manual coordination work, and noted the founding team's pedigree from Gmail and Google Calendar as a notable signal. The product has also accumulated favorable user ratings on review sites such as G2 and Product Hunt, where reviewers frequently praise its interface and the smoothness of its human-in-the-loop and AI features. As an independent assessment, the breadth and reliability claims are best treated with the usual caution applied to a relatively young, venture-backed startup.