The company that decided your Wi-Fi access point should also run software.
A logo, a mounting bracket, and a quietly radical premise: the box on the ceiling is not just a radio. It is a small computer, and it should earn its keep. Milpitas, California, 2011 - present.
There is a genre of company that looks, from the outside, like it sells one thing, and on closer inspection turns out to be arguing about the shape of an entire industry. Relay2 sells Wi-Fi access points. This is technically true and also completely misses the point, which is roughly the situation Relay2 has been in since 2011.
Here is the conventional wisdom Relay2 set out to annoy. A Wi-Fi access point is a radio. It takes your laptop's traffic and hands it to a wire. It is dumb on purpose, because dumb is cheap and reliable, and the actual thinking - the applications, the storage, the analytics - happens somewhere else, in a data center or a cloud that may be a thousand miles away. You generate data in a store in Ohio and it commutes to Virginia to be processed and then commutes back. Everyone agreed this was fine.
Relay2, founded by Eric Chen with a team drawn from Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, Siemens and Microsoft Research, did not agree it was fine. Their argument, which they eventually patented six ways, is that the round trip is a tax. Latency is a tax. Bandwidth is a tax. Shipping private data across the country and hoping nothing happens to it is, in its own way, a tax. And the funny thing about that access point on the ceiling is that it is already there, already powered, already sitting exactly where the data is born. Why not let it think?
So Relay2 built the thing you get when you take that idea seriously. They call it a Service Point, which is an access point with a computer and storage and container virtualization stuffed inside it. It does Wi-Fi, yes, but it also runs actual software - the on-premise, edge versions of the apps you would otherwise run in the cloud. One box, three jobs. The elegance here is not the individual parts, all of which exist elsewhere, but the refusal to accept that they belong in separate boxes.
The word for this is now "edge computing," and it is fashionable, and there are conferences. Relay2 was doing it before the word arrived, which is the kind of thing that sounds like bragging but is actually a mixed blessing. Being early to a good idea means spending years explaining why the idea is good to people who are not yet ready to buy it. Relay2 shipped its RA200 Service-Ready Access Points in 2016. The rest of the industry spent the following decade slowly agreeing.
Wrapped around the hardware is a cloud portal - the ServiceEdge Platform - that manages the Wi-Fi and the compute across however many sites you have, plus an Edge Application Orchestrator to deploy apps at scale, plus, and this is the part that quietly reveals the ambition, an app store. Not a metaphorical app store. An actual catalog of prequalified and open-source applications that a managed service provider can browse and drop onto the access points in a retail chain or a school district. The edge, in other words, as a platform rather than plumbing.
This matters because platforms compound and plumbing does not. If Relay2 were only selling access points, it would be one of a hundred networking vendors fighting on price. By turning the edge into somewhere applications live, it changes the customer's question from "how much is this box" to "what can this box do for me next quarter." For a managed service provider, that is the difference between a one-time sale and a recurring revenue line - which is exactly the pitch of the company's PartnerConnect program.
Relay2 set out to challenge the status quo of today's Wi-Fi access point market - to create a better and smarter connected world.— Relay2 company vision
A converged, cloud-managed system that fuses enterprise Wi-Fi with on-premise edge computing, storage and application hosting. Positioned as the industry's first converged edge platform for businesses of any size.
Patented service-ready access points that combine wireless access, computing power, dedicated storage and container virtualization in a single device on the wall.
Lets MSPs and organizations orchestrate, deploy and manage edge applications across a scaled, multi-site landscape - without hand-touching every box.
A catalog of prequalified and open-source edge applications that operators can discover and deploy directly onto their Service Points.
A single cloud portal to run Wi-Fi networks and edge computing across distributed locations, from one store to a national footprint.
A partner program that turns the access point MSPs already install into a launchpad for new, billable edge services and revenue.
The pitch is not abstract. When an application runs on the access point in the building instead of in a distant cloud, four things get better at once - and Relay2 has organized its entire product around widening these gaps.
The industries where this lands hardest are the ones with lots of data, thin connectivity, or strict privacy needs: retail floors, K-12 classrooms, smart factories, farms, building management and transit. Relay2 sells to all of them, plus the mobile operators and Wi-Fi carriers that want to resell the capability.
Illustrative — reflects Relay2's stated value proposition, not benchmarked figures.
Eric Chen assembles a team from Cisco, Juniper, Nokia and Siemens to rethink the Wi-Fi access point.
Fourth round adds $3.5M, bringing total raised to $13.5M for the cloud-controlled WiFi services platform.
Access points combining enterprise wireless, compute and dedicated storage for edge services.
Named among top Wi-Fi solutions companies by Enterprise Networking Magazine.
Doug Sinclair completes acquisition of a majority stake in Relay2 from T-Gaia Corporation.
Founded Relay2 in 2011 and holds six US patents. Directs product development and technology strategy, and is the person most responsible for the idea that the access point should think.
Harvard Business School MBA with deep Silicon Valley banking experience, having served as CFO for 13 companies. In 2024 he completed a majority-stake acquisition of Relay2.
Previously in research and development at Microsoft Research, focused on future networking concepts and software-development tooling.
Early, not just early-ish. Relay2's core idea - a computer inside the access point - predates the mainstream "edge computing" buzzword by years.
A pedigreed founding team. The founders came out of Cisco, Juniper, Nokia, Siemens and Microsoft Research - people who knew exactly which part of the stack annoyed them.
An app store for the wall. Relay2 runs a catalog of prequalified and open-source apps that live on the access point, not the cloud.
The CFO bought the company. Doug Sinclair had been CFO for 13 Silicon Valley firms before Relay2 - then, in 2024, acquired a majority stake in it.
Relay2 builds Wi-Fi access points with built-in computing and storage, plus a cloud-managed platform, so businesses can run applications at the network edge rather than in a distant cloud.
Eric Chen founded Relay2 in 2011 in Milpitas, California. He serves as Founder and CEO and holds six US patents.
It's Relay2's converged platform combining enterprise Wi-Fi, on-premise edge computing, an application orchestrator and an edge app store, all managed from the cloud.
Relay2 has raised roughly $13.5M in total, reaching a Series D round by 2015.
Enterprises and managed service providers in retail, education, manufacturing, agriculture, building management and transportation, along with mobile network operators and Wi-Fi carriers.