Atlas Relay began at a student hackathon in Cape Town, where the team's app kept timing out because the nearest public endpoint was in Frankfurt. They set up a node in Johannesburg for the weekend and kept it running when other teams asked to use it.
The round 4 grant paid for endpoints in Johannesburg and São Paulo, a free tier for small apps and a status page with latency by region. Atlas now serves 3.1 billion requests a month from nine regions.

