🌟A Note from Miles, Co-Founder & CEO @ Relai
Most of what we built this quarter was the boring kind of work. Not boring to us, but boring in the way that plumbing is boring. None of it is the kind of update that makes a good photo. All of it is the reason the next two years can be bigger than the last two. Relai spent a long time proving Exchange Zones work in real places. This quarter was about making them repeatable.
There is a version of a hardware company that builds one great unit and then spends five years fighting its own supply chain. We’re trying very hard not to be that. Everything below is a step away from it. Thanks for following along 💚
Cheers,
Miles
🔐 Relai Access is Live
Relai Access is open. It is the front door to the whole platform, and it replaces the patchwork of tools we had been running. What is there today:
A portal for EZ Hosts and Relai 3 partners. Your Exchange Zones, your orders, your compartments, in one place.
The Relai Access SDK and docs. Everything a builder (and a coding agent 👀) needs to open a compartment from their own app.
Sign-in for end users. One account across the EZ apps.
A Sandbox environment. Build and test against a simulated tower before a single door exists.
If you have ever asked us for a status page, an order history, or an API key, this is the answer. Sign in at access.relai.us.
🛠️ The next generation of EZs roll out November 1
Our next-gen hardware arrives November 1, and the headline is configuration. Exchange Zones can now be specified one door at a time.
That sounds small. It is the most requested thing we have ever built.
For Hosts: the tower matches your space and your foot traffic instead of a catalog spec. Mostly small compartments in a lobby, a few tall ones at a gym, whatever the block actually needs.
For Relai 3 partners: the tower matches your workflow. Configure for what your users hand off, not for the average of everyone else's.
There is a quieter benefit on our side. Building to a per-compartment standard improved our manufacturing efficiency and our unit economics at the same time, which is exactly the leverage a hardware company needs before it scales.
Choose your compartments: relai.us/platform/ez-hosts
📄 Our first research report: The Meetup Problem
We published The Meetup Problem, a 24 page paper from the Relai team on how people coordinate handoffs in real neighborhoods.
Category creation has a language problem. We have spent years explaining asynchronous access in conversations, on calls, and in demos. This is the first time the argument sits in one document that someone can read without us in the room.
It’s free to read and download: read the PDF.
🤝 Relai 3: STB & Vie Beauty at Essence Fest ‘26
STB Technologies and Vie Beauty teamed up to run a product launch on Exchange Zones at Essence Fest 2026 in New Orleans, and it worked. Three things ran through the same set of compartments over the weekend:
Product pick-up for buyers on site
Sampling and giveaway handoffs
VIP and influencer gifting
This is the Relai 3 thesis in one weekend. A team with their own launch, their own audience, and their own rules, using our infrastructure to move real items without staffing a table for every single handoff.
We want more of these! If you are building something that needs people to get physical items on their own schedule, we should talk: learn about Relai 3
🍏 Follow-up: our iOS apps are back
The Apple developer compliance review we wrote about in June was resolved soon after the last newsletter, and every EZ app is discoverable and downloadable again. New users can find us on both platforms. The lesson from that stretch still stands: app discovery cannot be a single point of failure as opens grow, and reducing that dependency is still on the roadmap.
💸 We started a pre-seed raise
Relai got here by bootstrapping. To do the next part well, we are raising a $500k pre-seed round, and we are currently 20% to our goal. What we are looking for:
Introductions to pre-seed VCs and angels who invest in hardware
Operators who have scaled physical infrastructure and want to be involved
The pitch and the data room are available on request. Email [email protected] and we will send it over. If you know the right person, an intro is the single most useful thing you can do for us this quarter.
🚀 What's Next for Relai
The rest of 2026 is two jobs running side by side: keep the sales momentum, and raise the capital that lets us execute against it. The link between them is fulfillment time. Faster deployment means more sales, and more sales means the next round of density.
Keep the sales momentum going
Close the pre-seed round
Cut fulfillment times
Ship new EZ hardware starting November 1
Sign more Relai 3 partners
Publish more research
📣 How to Support Relai
Investor intros 🤲
We are raising pre-seed and looking for hardware investors. Email [email protected] for the deck or the data room.
Read the research 📖
The Meetup Problem is free, and sending it to one person who thinks about cities, retail, or logistics helps us more than a repost. Read it here.