Relay to close as founder Jacob Bank takes Chrome product role at Google
AI-powered workflow automation startup Relay is shutting down, with paid customer access ending on September 14 and free customers having lost access on August 15. Its founder and chief executive, Jacob Bank, is returning to Google as vice president of product for Google Chrome, where he will lead Chrome’s product and developer relations teams.
Relay launched in 2021 with an ambition to become a new Zapier for AI-enabled work. The company had announced its closure in July, and Bank confirmed the timetable for customer access in a company announcement on Monday.
Automation product closes as leadership moves to Chrome
Relay was built to streamline repetitive business work through workflow automation. Its use cases included document drafting, copyediting and project-management tasks, positioning the product as a productivity layer for teams that wanted to automate routine processes.
Bank said his work has focused on tools that help people accomplish more with AI without sacrificing personal creativity or insight. He described Chrome as a place to collaborate with agents and said the team has ambitious plans for helping people work with AI in the browser.
Before founding Relay, Bank spent more than six years at Google. He joined the company in 2015 after Google acquired Timeful, his scheduling-app startup. During that period, he held product roles involving Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Chat before leaving to launch Relay.
Chrome’s AI roadmap gains an automation background
Google has already integrated Gemini into Chrome as an optional in-browser assistant. The company’s wider Gemini rollout also includes Search, and Google recently reported that Gemini had surpassed 1 billion users. The product direction follows Google’s Chrome AI assistant strategy for business, which examined Google’s effort to position Chrome as an AI assistant for business users.
Google and Relay did not provide further detail on how Bank and other former Relay staff will extend AI features in Chrome. The immediate facts are the planned Relay shutdown and Bank’s appointment to lead the browser’s product and developer relations functions.
Business implication
Businesses using Relay should complete their transition before the September 14 paid-access deadline. Teams evaluating AI-assisted browser workflows should also distinguish announced capabilities from existing production processes, while watching how Chrome’s product plans develop under its new leadership.