Relay.app

There's a particular frustration that Jacob Bank knows intimately: the moment an automated workflow quietly breaks, nobody notices, and a critical business process falls apart. Bank spent years at Google as product lead for Gmail and Google Calendar — the tools millions rely on to coordinate every working hour — and he understood better than most that automation without human judgment is fragile. In 2021, he left Google to build something different.

The Human-in-the-Loop Bet

Relay.app launched in public beta in late 2022 and reached general availability in October 2023, backed by $8.2M from Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The core thesis is deceptively simple: most workflow automation fails not because the software is buggy, but because real work requires human decisions that no rule can anticipate. Relay bakes that assumption into its architecture. Every workflow step — whether AI-powered or app-to-app — can be paused for a human to review, approve, or redirect before the automation continues.

The platform supports over 100 app integrations and lets users choose between GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Llama, and Mixtral at each AI step — or bring their own API keys. Early customers including Ramp, Skyflow, Warp, and Motion used Relay to automate client onboarding, lead enrichment, content pipelines, and internal ops. One notable case study: Cometa reduced customer onboarding from a month to two days using Relay workflows.

Small Team, Big Ambitions

As of 2025, Relay operates with a lean team of roughly 27 people and has grown to approximately $3M in ARR. The product has evolved rapidly — from collaborative workflow playbooks to full AI agent capabilities, including support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) announced in July 2025. Jacob Bank's LinkedIn following exploded from 4,000 to over 47,000 in a matter of months as he publicly built and shared AI agents using his own tool. That kind of founder-led content has become Relay's primary growth engine — a bet on authenticity over paid acquisition in a crowded automation market.