Relace raises $23M Series A to build AI agent infrastructure — used by Lovable, Figma, and 38 other companies

whatever they want. And, uh, it's it it's just like a complete failure to just have clarity around what the market structure should be. So, uh, lots of work to be done on the regulatory side, unfortunately. Um, well, without further ado, I think we have our first guest in the stream waiting room. Let's bring them in.

Let's bring in Preston. Here we go. Welcome to the show. Preston from Relays. Hey guys, it's great to be on. Great to have you. Uh, give us a quick introduction on yourself and the company and then we'll get into the news. Yeah, of course. Uh, my name is Preston.

I've been working on Relay with my co-founder, Eton Bourne. Um, and we've recently raised $23 million uh as a series. And there we go. Uh, when John gets back, we'll we'll hit the gong. But, uh, how did you get into building relays? When did you start it? What were you doing before? Yeah, that's a great question.

Um, before this, we were both PhD students. So, I was doing my PhD in physics. Uh, my co-founder at students PhD um in machine learning. Same college. No, I was at um Harvard and he was at Chicago. Uh but we went to Caltech as undergrads together. Very cool. Very cool. So straight from PhD program into relays.

Did you did you drop out or did you guys actually get your degrees? Yeah, we dropped out. There you go. Um there just come out and we were like this is the time to do it. Amazing. what uh uh obviously hyper competitive category, tons of activity. What uh what's been your guys's initial edge and focus?

Yeah, so we've been really focused on approaching um the developer experience from but from the experience of the agent itself. Uh and so um we don't consider ourselves um like competitors with like cursor or cognition or anything like that.

um we're building the infrastructure that someone would want to use when they're building AI agents. Uh and so what we've focused on to start are all these auxiliary models that make these AI agents more reliable. Um for as an example, if I'm a human, I love my autocomplete. I love my tab autocomplete.

Uh if I'm an agent, I have a different set of models that are really useful to me. Um so this is like what we've started out with. Um this is like our fast apply model which applies diffs. uh and our embedding and re-rank models which is able to find the relevant code in your codebase um in less than a second.

Uh and this is used by 40 companies including like lovable and Figma etc. How do you think OpenAI's agent builder product is going to is going to play out?

Um, it seemed like a cool like like new capability and but I'm not sure I haven't had the pull like the other products that they've released in the last couple weeks to just like jump in, try it, play around. Uh, what what's been your read on agent builder from OpenAI? Yeah. Um, I've heard good things.

I mean, it looks very beautiful. Um, it's it's a definitely a different category than what we've been building in. Um but I think the launch went really well. Yeah. Uh what does uh success look like over the next 12 months?

Yeah, for us uh we really want to now with this raise um optimize the infrastructure along with the models itself. Um I think as an example like cursor has done such a great job of optimizing the product with the models.

uh and so all the models that you have within your IDE uh the ply model and the tab autocomplete uh make this product work very seamlessly. We want to do the same thing for the infrastructure and so we recently also released uh relays repos along with our series A announcement.

Um it means that you can now have retrieval embedded directly into your source control. Uh, and we're really trying to like reimagine like hey like what does source control look like when you have access to models to make it better and when you're like exclusively focused on um building it for the agent uh code agent.

What's the biggest company that you've pitched or talked to in customer development? I'd love to know the mood and the receptivity. We've seen some uh some news about like the Fortune 500 trying a bunch of AI stuff and then kind of pulling back from it.

Have you talked to any big companies and and can you share any context on how bigger companies are thinking about adopting AI broadly? Yeah. And have you even been focused there? Are you focused on uh scaleups like lovable and sort of founder mode companies like Figma? Yeah.

Um I mean we're talking to all of the big uh vibe coding companies. Um you know lovable figma are some of the examples. Um I think the way we think about this is that uh these LLMs are going to continue to increase in capability.

Um we're seeing kind of what dominoes fall in the first say like year year and a half of uh like models that are like reasonably good at coding. So already if I need a um marketing website or or a simple presentation I can actually like b code that on like replet or lovable.

Um I think over the next year two years 3 years as we continue to see um the capabilities increase uh more and more things that are now traditionally software will be able to express uh in code and and this is like what we're very interested in.

This is why uh we're saying that we're building the rails for software on demand. Um it's because things we've seen people build like PowerPoints and decks in Typescript and React instead of using PowerPoint anymore. Uh we've seen people use like consumer Tik Tok filters that are entirely expressed in code.

This one of our customers, Gizmo. Uh, and we think that a lot of what we might not consider software today will end up being software and the thing that runs and creates it is going to be a coding agent. Well, congratulations on the round. I'm going to hit that gong. Boom. Awesome. Congratulations on the raise.

I'm sure we'll have you back on again soon for the B uh with the way things are going currently and congrats on uh all the initial traction. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. We have a review from Trip Carolyn that we got to read through.

Uh he says, and of course, as a reminder, if you leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, put an ad for your business in that review review. We'll read it on the show. Uh Gulf Streams, wrist hitters, impeccable ad reads, the daily coverage of technology news. Uh what more could one ask for?

Between John and Jordy, they have the height and the hair to revolutionize technology and private capital commentary. Putting the TB in capital G journalism. I have been an avid fan from the inception and will be for life. Cannot recommend more to anyone interested in business technology or loud opulence.

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Uh fantastic trip truly has been uh a fan on the show, fan