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

Rhea-AI Summary

Relay (NASDAQ:BAND) reported a landmark year of growth and strategic hires on Jan 23, 2026. The company posted a 461% three-year revenue growth rate, ranked #175 on Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and #920 on Inc. 5000. Relay says it generates over 1 billion new data points per week, has >40 Fortune 500 customers, and 47% of revenue from $100K+ ARR customers with an NRR >135%. Product and IP milestones include 32 new features, RelayM device, Fleet Shield lifecycle program, and the 100th patent. Relay added CMO Matthew Welch and CFO Shiv Hira to scale toward a potential IPO.

Positive

• Three-year revenue growth of 461%
• #175 ranking on Deloitte Technology Fast 500
• Over 1 billion new data points generated weekly
• 47% of revenue from $100K+ ARR customers
• Net revenue retention (NRR) of >135% among enterprise clients
• 100 patents in portfolio; 11 awarded in 2025

Negative

• None.

News Market Reaction

+5.08%

13 alerts

+5.08% News Effect

+4.8% Peak in 36 min

+$22M Valuation Impact

$462M Market Cap

0.5x Rel. Volume

On the day this news was published, BAND gained 5.08%, reflecting a notable positive market reaction. Argus tracked a peak move of +4.8% during that session. Our momentum scanner triggered 13 alerts that day, indicating notable trading interest and price volatility. This price movement added approximately $22M to the company's valuation, bringing the market cap to $462M at that time.

Data tracked by StockTitan Argus on the day of publication.

Key Figures

Three-year revenue growth: 461% Deloitte Fast 500 rank: #175 Inc. 5000 rank: #920 +5 more

8 metrics

Three-year revenue growth 461% Relay three-year revenue growth rate

Deloitte Fast 500 rank #175 Relay ranking on 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500

Inc. 5000 rank #920 Relay ranking among fastest-growing private companies in America

Data points per week over 1 billion New industrial ground-truth data points created weekly by Relay

AI adoption rate over 78% Share of new industrial Relay customers using AI features

Enterprise customer mix 47% Relay revenue from $100K+ ARR customers

Patents in portfolio 100 Relay total patents after securing its 100th patent

New patents in 2025 11 Relay patents awarded in 2025

Market Reality Check

Price: $14.46 Vol: Volume 217,411 is modestl...

normal vol

$14.46 Last Close

Volume Volume 217,411 is modestly above the 20-day average of 194,136 (about 1.12x). normal

Technical Price at $13.79 is trading below the 200-day MA of $14.72 and well under the 52-week high.

Peers on Argus

BAND is up 1.25% while peers are mixed: ALLT +1.82%, CCSI +0.93%, BLZE +1.46%, D...

BAND is up 1.25% while peers are mixed: ALLT +1.82%, CCSI +0.93%, BLZE +1.46%, DAVA +2.40%, and XNET -3.97%. Mixed peer moves and no momentum scanner hits suggest stock-specific trading rather than a broad sector rotation.

Historical Context

5 past events · Latest: Jan 22 (Positive)

Pattern 5 events

Date	Event	Sentiment	Move	Catalyst
Jan 22	Messaging trends report	Positive	+1.3%	Release of 2026 State of Messaging Report highlighting major industry shifts.
Oct 30	Q3 2025 earnings	Positive	-3.9%	Q3 results with raised full-year Adjusted EBITDA and revenue guidance.
Oct 08	Earnings call notice	Neutral	+2.6%	Announcement of date and details for upcoming Q3 2025 earnings call.
Sep 30	AI award win	Positive	-4.5%	Ally Financial technology disruptor award for AI-enabled cloud communications.
Sep 24	AI integration news	Positive	+0.1%	Support for OpenAI’s Realtime API to power advanced AI voice agents.

Pattern Detected

Recent BAND news often receives mixed reactions: several positive announcements (AI partnerships, awards, earnings) have seen both gains and sell-offs, indicating no consistent pattern of follow-through on good news.

Recent Company History

Over the last few months, Bandwidth (BAND) has focused on AI-driven communications and platform expansion. In September–October 2025, it announced AI integrations with OpenAI’s Realtime API, won Ally Financial’s 2025 Technology Disruptor award, and reported Q3 2025 results with raised Adjusted EBITDA guidance. A January 22, 2026 messaging report highlighted shifts toward RCS and multimodal apps. Market reactions have alternated between gains and pullbacks, underscoring inconsistent sensitivity to generally positive news.

Market Pulse Summary

The stock moved +5.1% in the session following this news. A strong positive reaction aligns with BAN...

Analysis

The stock moved +5.1% in the session following this news. A strong positive reaction aligns with BAND’s existing positioning in cloud communications and AI. The article highlights Relay’s growth and the addition of a former BAND executive with IPO experience, which could be interpreted as validation of BAND’s talent pool. However, past news has sometimes led to pullbacks after gains, as seen following prior positive announcements, so enthusiasm could face later consolidation.

Key Terms

nrr, arr, mil-std-810h, ipo, +1 more

5 terms

nrr financial

"Relay continues to demonstrate extremely strong customer value with an NRR of over 135%..."

Net Revenue Retention (NRR) measures how much recurring revenue a company keeps from its existing customers over a set period after accounting for upgrades, downgrades, and churn. Think of it like checking whether a group of regular customers are spending more, the same, or less than before; a number above 100% means growth from the existing base and signals healthy, sustainable revenue, while a low NRR warns investors of shrinking core income.

arr financial

"Additionally, 47% of Relay's revenue now comes from $100K+ ARR customers."

ARR, or Annual Recurring Revenue, is the predictable income a business expects to earn each year from ongoing customer subscriptions or contracts. It’s like a steady paycheck that shows the company's ability to generate consistent revenue over time, helping investors assess its stability and growth potential. ARR provides a clear picture of how well a company is performing in building long-term customer relationships.

mil-std-810h technical

"By packing full enterprise ruggedness (MIL-STD-810H) and intelligence into a device..."

MIL-STD-810H is a U.S. military engineering standard that describes laboratory and field tests to see how equipment performs under harsh environmental conditions—such as extreme temperatures, shock, vibration, humidity, dust, salt fog and altitude. For investors, a product tested or designed to meet this standard is like a vehicle with proven crash-and-weather tests: it signals higher durability and reliability in tough settings, which can lower warranty costs, support defense or industrial contracts, and improve market credibility.

ipo financial

"...culminated in a NASDAQ IPO in 2020."

An initial public offering (IPO) is the process by which a private company sells its shares to the public for the first time, making its ownership available on the stock market. This allows the company to raise money from a wide range of investors to fund growth or other goals. For investors, an IPO offers a chance to buy into a company early in its public journey, potentially benefiting if the company grows in value.

p&l financial

"he managed the global content P&L along with marketing, customer service..."

A P&L, short for profit and loss statement, is a snapshot of a company's money in and money out over a set period that shows whether the business made a profit or suffered a loss. Think of it like a household budget or a scorecard: it shows sales, costs and the bottom-line result, helping investors judge whether the company is earning enough, managing expenses, and likely to grow or face financial stress.

AI-generated analysis. Not financial advice.

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.

Media Contact
Michael Zema
relay@unshakablemarketinggroup.com

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SOURCE Relay Inc.

FAQ

What growth metrics did Relay (BAND) report on Jan 23, 2026?

Relay reported a 461% three-year revenue growth rate, a Deloitte Fast 500 rank of #175, and an Inc. 5000 rank of #920.

How large is Relay's operational dataset and how fast is it growing?

Relay said it creates over 1 billion new data points per week, which it uses to power AI features like TeamTranslate.

What enterprise customer metrics did Relay disclose for BAND investors?

Relay stated it has >40 Fortune 500 customers, 47% revenue from $100K+ ARR customers, and NRR >135% among those enterprise clients.

What product and IP milestones did Relay announce in 2025 for BAND?

Relay launched RelayM, Fleet Shield, released 32 new features across 24 releases, and reached its 100th patent with 11 patents in 2025.

Who joined Relay's leadership on Jan 23, 2026 and why does it matter for BAND?

Matthew Welch joined as CMO and Shiv Hira as CFO to scale go-to-market and finance operations and to help prepare Relay for a potential IPO.