We built Batch Relay to giveweekends back.
I got close to sports photography through the behind-the-scenes work—the unglamorous stuff that has to go right for families to get what they’re excited about. I was the person wrangling the messy part after the shoot: reconciling rosters, fixing name mismatches, chasing jersey numbers, sending out extra info forms, answering order questions, and trying to keep the whole machine moving without dropping the details that parents care about.
As Mike put it: I didn’t start taking photos to spend my weekends doing data entry. I started because I love the moment a parent sees their kid light up.
I'm Kirkland Layton (SENTINELITE)—a software engineer who gets a little obsessive about removing friction from creative work. Batch Relay wasn't born in a boardroom. It came out of real pressure: high volume, high expectations, and a workflow that turned every season into an inbox + spreadsheet marathon. There was stress, and there were hard weeks—especially when the operational load started stealing weekends.
The turning point came from working closely with studios doing this for real. Mike Bennett brought the on-the-ground perspective of a volume sports photographer: what breaks under pressure, what steals time, and what *actually* needs to be automated to scale. Another studio owner, Joey, told me he got into photography as a hobby to see the good in people after seeing the bad all day. That kind of heart is why this matters.
Kirkland, between builds.
Mike, keeping it grounded.
We made mistakes. We built things the wrong way first. And yes—we talked about quitting more than once. When volume hits and the season is relentless, it's easy to wonder if the status quo is just “how it has to be.” But the mission stayed simple: give studios their time back.
That's why we're here. Not to chase "the world's biggest platform," but to give you your life back. Batch Relay is built so you can keep full creative control—and let the operational weight move quietly in the background.
To make that possible at real scale, we went deep: validation rules, edge cases, packaging logic, and direct lab-side integration. We've built with the first-largest second-largest professional printing provider in the United States at a level of access that's typically reserved for much bigger partners—because when thousands of prints are on the line, "good enough" isn't good enough. And because your workflow shouldn't be boxed in by any one vendor's rules.
How we show up
We're a small team, and we take reliability personally. We validate data before it hits the lab, we monitor the pipeline, and we answer like humans—not ticket numbers. If something looks off, we'll tell you early and help you fix it fast.
Thanks for trusting us with your work. It means more than you know.