AI automation startup Relay shuts down, staff joins Google’s Chrome team

Relay set out in 2021 to be the next Zapier, but the AI workflow startup is now shutting down. Founder and CEO Jacob Bank announced Monday that paying customers will lose access on September 14, while free users already lost access on August 15. The shutdown had been announced earlier, in July.

Bank isn’t just walking away from one product; he’s heading back to Google. He spent a little more than six years there before leaving to start Relay, and now he says he’s rejoining as vice president of product for Google Chrome. In that role, according to his LinkedIn, he’ll lead product and developer relations for Chrome.

Relay’s pitch was familiar but useful: use AI and automation to take repetitive work off people’s plates. That meant things like drafting documents, copyediting, and project management chores. It was the kind of tool that promises to save time without asking users to change how they think. Bank even said Chrome is “a perfect place to collaborate with agents.”

And that’s the real story here. Google keeps pulling AI closer to the browser, not just search. Gemini is already in search and also inside Chrome as an optional assistant, and Google recently said Gemini had passed 1 billion users. Now one of the people who spent years building productivity tools with AI is moving into the browser itself.