Relay.app

Jacob Bank sold his previous company, the scheduling app Timeful, to Google in 2015, then spent years as a product lead on Gmail, Calendar, and Workspace before leaving in July 2021 to build Relay. The pitch was the sensible middle of workflow automation: the integration count of a Zapier, but with a human approval step wired into the handoff, so software about to do the wrong thing on your behalf had to ask first. Khosla Ventures led a 5 million dollar seed in October 2022, Andreessen Horowitz added 3.1 million a year later, and Relay spent the boom rebuilding itself around agents it described as teammates. What it could not survive was every other automation product doing the same thing in the same eighteen months, which turned a careful approval step from a differentiator into a checkbox everyone shipped. Relay stopped taking signups on July 16, 2026 and posted a notice that opened with the words difficult news: free accounts end on August 15, 2026, and paying customers on September 14. No reason was given, which in a year when every workflow tool became an agent company is close to a complete one.

Founded

2021-07

Shut down

2026-09-14

Funding raised

$8M

Years alive

5

Founders

Jacob Bank