Being somewhat later than Europe in adopting the idea of parcel delivery, much of Asia built its delivery infrastructure around e-commerce, effectively “Uberizing” how deliveries worked down to the last mile. Think DoorDash but for parcels, not food. This is what the founders of Europe’s Relay realized and decided to bring to the region — and why investors just gave it a massive Series A round.
Most Western parcel delivery companies have fixed daily routes for drivers, dispatching them from far-flung depots near places like airports to suburban destinations. This creates enormous overhead, wastes mileage, and increases carbon emissions for parcels, especially if they are returned. Instead, Asia’s “asset-free” model uses mini-depots, like a local store.
Relay’s end-to-end parcel delivery service adopts this approach, operating more like a food delivery app. It matches couriers to routes, combines deliveries and returns into a single trip, and replaces large trucks with carbon-reducing e-bikes.
Founded by CEO Jonathan Jenssen and COO Nicole Mazza, who both previously worked at last-mile delivery company Stuart, Relay is now clearly entering its AI-driven scale-up phase.
Most delivery people take a static photo of the handover. Relay enhances this with computer vision, boosting proof-of-delivery compliance by 82%, per its estimates.
As Jenssen told TechCrunch over a call: “When we hand over a parcel to a customer, we’re able to detect, has it been left in the garbage bin? Has it been left on the porch? This is just one small example of how we improve our quality of service, reduce claims for retailers, but don’t increase our cost. And then that feedback is given directly to the couriers so they know what they’re doing in their training. They’re getting better.”
That last-mile model also significantly reduces energy consumption. “With just one of our customers we can save a billion miles a year. So imagine this across multiple cities. We’re making a huge environmental impact. And there’s fewer touch points, so there’s less chance of it getting lost,” added Jenssen.
The platform is now used by Vinted, TikTok, Temu, and U.K. retailers such as THG Fulfil. It is also now in most U.K. cities, including London and Manchester.
Meanwhile, parcel deliveries are on the rise. The global shipping market is forecast to surpass 224 billion parcels by 2030, up from 161 billion in 2023, fueled mostly by e-commerce.
To scale further, Relay has now raised a $35 million Series A round led by London-based VC, Plural — a fund started, in part, by the founders of fintech giant Wise. The round also included participation from Germany’s Project A and Prologis Ventures, the VC arm of global logistics real estate leader Prologis.
In a statement: Taavet Hinrikus, partner at Plural, said of why he’s so enthusiastic about the company: “Jonathan and Nicole are the perfect pair to do this, having lived and breathed the last-mile delivery revolution for almost a decade. Their asset-light model, optimized by AI, is already leading to delivery times that are a fraction of incumbents.”