Guideline, a San Mateo, Calif.-based financial technology startup with a software development office in Portland, plans to double its local headcount from 20 to 40 people after raising $35 million.

The company, founded in 2015, has developed a software stack that allows it to offer small businesses the ability to provide 401(k) plans to its employees for lower fees than most traditional options. It works with 5,500 small businesses across the country and has increased its assets under management to $750 million, a 270% increase from last year, according to the company.

Mike Nelson, Guideline’s CTO and co-founder, is a Maine native (grew up in Auburn) and lives in the Portland area. He said Guideline has benefitted from having its office in Portland because of the city’s strong cluster of financial technology companies (WEX, Certify, CashStar, PowerPay, BlueTarp, etc.) and the talent they foster.

“It’s an engineering-heavy office, but there are already other roles here as well,” Nelson told Maine Startups Insider this week. “Around half of the engineers are in the Portland location.”

Mike Nelson, a Maine native, co-founded Guideline in California before moving back to Maine and opening a software development office in Portland for the fintech startup. (Photo/Guideline)
Guideline employs approximately 100 people spread across its San Mateo headquarters and offices in Portland and Austin, Texas. The Portland office, currently located on Monument Square, includes about 20 people, but Nelson said he plans to double that number—”if not more”—next year. He also plans to move the local Guideline crew into 11,000 sq. ft. of brand new office space at 16 Middle St. in the spring.

“One of the attractions to this area is how prominent the banking industry is in the Northeast,” he said. “In addition to engineering, we’re trying to grow customer service and operations teams in Portland.”

Those growth plans are being fueled by the company’s recent $35 million Series C financing, which the company announced this week. The company has raised $59 million to date.

Nelson, who studied mechanical engineering and computer science at the University of Southern Maine, is glad he’s been able to build an engineering team in Portland.

“When I was leaving college and entering the workforce I assumed I would have to leave Maine to find something that I could get excited about,” Nelson said.

Instead he was able to connect with other like-minded individuals and started working on startups. For those who’ve followed the Maine startup scene for a while, they might remember Nelson’s first startup, AccelGolf, which was accepted into TechStars, raised some seed funding, and gained early traction with iPhone and BlackBerry apps that allowed users to turn their phones into a virtual scorecard and GPS rangefinder on 22,000 golf courses around the world. (I wrote about the company back in 2009 for Mainebiz.) Nelson served as AccelGolf’s CTO and wrote the original BlackBerry application that was responsible for its first 40,000 members. That company was sold in 2010.

Nelson did end up leaving Maine for a while, moving to the San Francisco area after his next startup, SkillSlate, was acquired in 2011 by TaskRabbit. It was in California that Nelson met his Guideline co-founders: Kevin Busque, who co-founded TaskRabbit and is now Guideline’s CEO, and Jeremy Caballero, Guideline’s chief designer.

Guideline is growing fast (it only had four people in Portland during the summer of 2017) and is a local startup to watch.