Build2 publishers3 min readPublished
Relay's last day is September 14th; its founder's next job is Chrome VP
Paid Relay workspaces stop at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on September 14th, and stored credentials are deleted with them. Jacob Bank takes the approval-checkpoint idea into Google Chrome.
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What happened
- Relay is shutting down and founder Jacob Bank is returning to Google to lead product and developer relations for Chrome, according to TechCrunch's August 17th report; some Relay employees will join him.
- Free Relay accounts closed on August 15th, while paying customers retain access through September 14th.
- Relay began its shutdown process on July 16th, when it disabled new signups and upgrades and canceled paid subscriptions.
- Free users had 30 days to export their work before their accounts were scheduled for deletion at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on August 15th.
- Paying customers received a 60-day transition period ending at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on September 14th.
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Why it matters
Relay, the no-code automation product that positioned itself between Zapier's trigger-based integrations and collaborative work-management tools such as Asana, is shutting down, and founder Jacob Bank is returning to Google to lead product and developer relations for Chrome, with some Relay employees joining him [1][14]. For anyone who put a recurring business process on it, the news that matters is the calendar, not the hire.
The wind-down started on July 16th, when Relay disabled new signups and upgrades and canceled paid subscriptions [3]. Free users got 30 days to export, with accounts scheduled for deletion at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on August 15th [4]. Paying customers got a 60-day transition ending at 11:59 p.m. Pacific on September 14th [5], which is 60 calendar days from the July 16th announcement [22]. Annual subscribers are to receive prorated refunds for unused billing periods, and each paid workspace was given an extra 25,000 workflow steps and 10,000 AI credits per month during the transition [6][7].
That extra quota is a bridge, not a migration path. Exports cover workflows, sequences and MCP servers as JSON files, plus prompts, run histories and tables [8]. What does not come out is the part that takes the longest to rebuild: Relay says accounts, stored credentials, authentication tokens and unexported data will be permanently deleted after each transition window [9]. Every connected app has to be reauthorized by hand wherever the workflow lands next, and the JSON cannot do that for you. Relay's service is disappearing rather than continuing under Google, while Bank and some colleagues move into Chrome [10], so there is no hosted fallback to drift into.
Bank's landing spot is specific. According to his LinkedIn profile, cited by mezha.net, he becomes vice president of product for Google Chrome, responsible for Chrome's product and developer relations teams [11]. In a post on X he called Chrome "a perfect place to collaborate with agents" and said he plans to help users get work done with AI in the browser [12]. He is not new to the building: he left a Stanford AI Lab Ph.D. program to co-found Timeful, which Google acquired in 2015, then spent a little over six years at Google in product leadership roles across Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Chat before leaving in July 2021 to build Relay [13].
The design he is carrying over is the interesting part. At Relay's October 2023 public launch, its AI steps summarized text, classified incoming email, extracted information and drafted content, each paired with human approval checkpoints so a user could inspect output before a message went out or a business record changed [15]. Bank argued publicly that fully autonomous agents often waste tokens and produce less predictable results when a process should follow the same plan every time [16]. Tasks could be assigned to a person or a role, letting a run halt for an approval, a missing field or a judgment call, across onboarding, meeting prep, support triage, document drafting and finance work [17].
The financing explains the shape of the outcome. Khosla Ventures led a $5 million round in 2022 with Neo, BoxGroup, SV Angel and angels; Andreessen Horowitz led a further $3.1 million announced with the 2023 launch [18][19]. Relay's own company page claims $8.2 million raised against $8.1 million announced, a $100,000 gap, and no valuation was disclosed [20][21]. Small totals, capable team, product retired.
Watch whether Chrome ships cross-app agent work with Relay's approval checkpoints intact, or without them. mezha.net notes Chrome already uses AI as a secondary assistant and frames Relay's automation experience as reinforcement for that direction amid Gemini's rollout across Google products [23]. And watch September 14th: after it, exported JSON is all that remains [8][9].