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
01

We're brothers who grew up in our family's restaurant, StokeRidge Tavern & Grill. Host stand, kitchen, bar, floor manager. We worked every role.

02

Every shift, the same waste: every order taken twice. Once at the table, then again at a terminal across the room. So we built Relay. It captures what staff already do and turns it into structured orders. Dine-in, to-go, and phone, same engine.

Meet the founders

Braden Champion, CEO and Co-Founder of Relay

Braden Champion

CEO & Co-Founder

The Operator

Ten years on the restaurant floor before building software for it. Every role from host stand to floor manager at StokeRidge Tavern & Grill. Now leads customer-facing product development, go-to-market, and partnerships.

  • Signed Relay's first 12 pilot restaurants founder-led
  • NC State entrepreneurship graduate & Miller Fellow
  • Shaped Relay's staff-facing product with 100+ operators
  • Owns operator relationships from first demo through live deployment
Trevor Champion, CTO and Co-Founder of Relay

Trevor Champion

CTO & Co-Founder

The Engineer

Four years scaling Cybertruck battery cell production at Tesla - then came home to build for the industry he grew up in. Leads Relay's core engineering.

  • 13 years in restaurant operations, starting at 13
  • NC State engineering graduate
  • Built Relay end to end: speech-to-text, parsing, POS injection
  • Tesla-grade reliability discipline, applied to restaurant software

Advised by Craig Miller, former CIO of Sonic Drive-In.

In the news

GrepBeat Kaitlyn Dang July 1, 2026

NC State Brothers to Serve Restaurant Industry with AI-Voice Native Tech

Read the article

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