Relay is shutting down and its founder is running Chrome product

Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool launched in 2021 with the stated goal of becoming the new Zapier, is closing. Paying customers lose access on 14 September. Free users lost access on 15 August. The shutdown was first announced in July, and founder and CEO Jacob Bank confirmed the details on Monday.

Bank is rejoining Google as VP of Product for Chrome, leading the product and developer relations teams.

The loop closes

Bank's path is almost too neat. He joined Google in 2015 when his scheduling startup Timeful was acquired. He spent six years there as product lead across Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Chat. He left to build Relay. Relay is now shutting down and he is going back, this time running product for the browser.

His own framing, posted to X, was that he has spent his career building tools that help people get more done with AI without sacrificing personal creativity, and that Chrome is an ideal way to reach far more people with that. He called Chrome "a perfect place to collaborate with agents."

Absorbed by the layer below

Relay did the reasonable thing. It offered workflow automation for repetitive business tasks, including document drafting, copyediting and project management, with AI layered in. That is a real product solving a real problem.

It is also a product with no defensible position once the browser itself becomes agentic.

If the thing executing your multi-step workflow is Chrome, sitting where your tabs, sessions, credentials and context already live, a standalone automation tool is competing against something that starts with every structural advantage. Distribution, default placement, and access to the page you are actually looking at.

That pattern generalises. A great many AI application startups in 2024 and 2025 built capabilities the platform layer would eventually absorb. Not through bad execution. The capability simply belonged one layer down.

The Google context

The move fits a visible trajectory. Gemini's integration into search has reshaped Google's front end and, downstream, a large part of the open web. Gemini already ships in Chrome as an optional in-browser assistant. Google recently reported Gemini crossing one billion users.

Bank says he has ambitious plans for helping people work with AI in Chrome and will share more soon. TechCrunch reached out to both Google and Relay for further comment.

The question this leaves

The acquihire-shaped ending is not quite a failure story. The team lands well and the founder gets a much larger canvas.

But for anyone building an AI product today, Relay's ending poses a blunt question: what do you have that the platform cannot simply include? If the honest answer is a better interface for something the browser will ship natively, the runway is shorter than the funding suggests.

Source: AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google's Chrome team — TechCrunch