Our Story

Born in a restaurant.
Built for every restaurant.

Relay wasn't born in a lab. It was born from years of watching orders get lost, remade, and delayed - and deciding to fix it.

1 Family restaurant
2 Brothers
100+ Operator interviews
22 Locations in pipeline
Young Braden and Trevor Champion at their father's restaurant
Then Growing up at the restaurant
Braden and Trevor Champion in the kitchen today
Now Building the future of restaurant tech

Origin

From the dining room floor to the founding team

01

Braden and Trevor Champion are brothers who grew up working in their father's restaurant, Stokeridge Tavern in Greensboro, NC. From hosting to floor management, they lived every part of restaurant operations.

02

They watched servers spend hours per shift walking back and forth to POS terminals. They saw orders get lost in translation, guests wait too long, and margins suffer from preventable mistakes. They knew there had to be a better way.

03

In 2025, they decided to build it. Relay was born - an AI system that captures what servers are already doing (talking to guests) and turns it into structured orders automatically. No new workflows. Just technology that works the way restaurants already do.

The Team

Meet the founders

Braden Champion, CEO and Co-Founder of Relay

Braden Champion

CEO & Co-Founder

GTM

NC State entrepreneurship graduate with a restaurant operations background from host to floor manager. Leads go-to-market strategy, partnerships, and POS integrations.

  • Built the 22-location pilot pipeline
  • 100+ operator interviews validating Relay
  • NC State Miller Fellow
  • Leads POS injection pipeline for NCR, Toast, Clover, and Square
Trevor Champion, CTO and Co-Founder of Relay

Trevor Champion

CTO & Co-Founder

Engineering

NC State mechanical engineering graduate and former Tesla mechanical engineer turned full-stack developer.

  • Former Tesla mechanical engineer
  • Product architecture & full-stack engineering
  • Built Relay's 3-layer architecture
  • Speech-to-text, semantic parsing, POS injection pipeline

Where It Started

Featured on Fox8 News

Before Relay, Braden and Trevor built EasySear - a fully autonomous, hands-free grill. Fox8 covered their early vision for transforming restaurant operations with technology.

The Vision

The first layer of an AI operating system for restaurants

Relay starts with voice ordering and POS automation - eliminating the most painful friction point in restaurant operations. From there, the platform expands into operational intelligence across restaurant workflows: labor optimization, demand prediction, and upsell insights.

Get a Demo Why Relay