Modern Relay, a company with operational bases in Barcelona and San Francisco (California, USA), has closed a $3 million funding round (€2.6 million) to accelerate its business in infrastructure for coordinating employees and artificial intelligence (AI).
The round is led by Point Nine, a German venture capital firm that has previously invested in other Barcelona-based startups such as Factorial, Typeform, and Amenitiz. Other European funds also participated, along with Masia, a fund backed by Carlos Trenchs, co-founder of Aldea Ventures, and Pepe Borrell, former executive at the crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. The round also includes business angels Charlie Songhurst, board member at Meta; Thomas Clozel, co-founder of Owkin; and Sarah Drinkwater, partner at Common Magic.
Modern Relay has developed a platform designed to coordinate human employees with AI agents without data ever leaving company servers. This comes at a time when, as organizations automate and delegate critical processes, key information is often fragmented across documents, spreadsheets, and siloed tools. IT teams are increasingly reluctant to outsource their systems, so Modern Relay’s tool ensures that data never leaves the customer’s infrastructure.
The company notes that its choice of location “is not accidental”: “The city has become one of the most relevant hubs of the new wave of artificial intelligence in Europe,” a positioning they link to the concentration of technical talent living in Barcelona, the maturity of its startup ecosystem, and its strategic geographic location bridging Europe and the Americas.
But what exactly does Modern Relay do? What founders Comerford and Goh identified—and what convinced their new investors—is that there are significant inefficiencies in how AI is used within companies. Each department may use its own agent or platform that not only fails to communicate with others but also does not learn from what other departments are doing.
“We want to be the layer that brings it all together,” they summarize. Their role is to connect with the AI platforms a client company already uses so that, for example, material generated by the finance department is also accessible to the sales team. “Data never leaves the company’s infrastructure,” emphasize Modern Relay, which is focusing on clients operating in regulated environments where data security is even more critical.
“In the context of AI, what was missing was this collaborative layer, almost like Google Drive,” they explain, to justify raising such a significant round at such an early stage, backed by high-profile investors (Point Nine has previously invested in Factorial, Typeform, and Amenitiz). Although the company has been developing its technology for years and already generates revenue through pilot contracts, the financing round was completed when the team consisted only of Comerford and Goh.
The funds will be used to hire talent, improve the platform, and scale distribution.
“Modern Relay is addressing one of the most relevant gaps in the infrastructure of this market,” says Ricardo Sequerra, partner at Point Nine, which led the round. “As organizations move from experimenting with AI to deploying it in production, they need more than access to models or standalone tools,” he adds. “They need a reliable way to coordinate work, manage context, and govern change.”
For Pepe Borrell, partner at Masia, the company has “understood before anyone else that the coordination and governance layer for agents must live within the infrastructure controlled by enterprises.” That conviction, “built from Barcelona but with global ambition,” he concludes, “is key for the continued maturation of the local ecosystem.”
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