🔒Bold ventures: Maine financiers take varied routes to backing startups

From home-grown venture capital to revenue-linked debt, startup financing in Maine is gathering pace. That’s opening doors for entrepreneurs who may not qualify for — or want — commercial bank loans, are maxed out on grants or aren’t yet ready to court deep-pocketed investors on bigger stages. New backers include a venture capital firm aiming to close its first two investments this month; a venture studio that’s tapping academic talent to get new businesses off the ground; and a revenue-based debt instrument for growth capital. With some caveats, experts expect more venture firms to enter the fray. “Maine has great potential, but will need much more density of world-class talent and world-class R&D to become a mini-Silicon Valley,” says Jason Harkins, executive dean of the Maine Business School and associate professor of entrepreneurship. He nevertheless predicts that “as Maine’s startup economy and ecosystem continues to develop and support more scalable businesses, more venture firms and investments will follow.” Here are three funding routes off the beaten path.

Agile ‘super-angel’ takes flight

An angel investor and entrepreneur with two successful exits under his belt, Chris Wolfel feels right at home in venture capital. He recently founded Corsair Venture Partners to invest in early-stage startups across New England. Wolfel, who named his business in a nod to the privateers of yore enlisted to seize new markets and land, aims to do something similar by “building bold companies in real-world markets” and backing them “before anyone else does,” as his website touts. He plans to target startups modernizing legacy sectors such as advanced manufacturing and construction tech as well as companies “enabling the everyday economy” by creating tools and technology for industries including hospitality, tourism, health and wellness and education. Corsair’s focus is on pre-seed investing in startups that show early signs of demand, even if the business is not yet generating any revenue. Like the entrepreneurs Wolfel aims to support, “I love that really messy, chaotic, figuring-it-out stage,” Wolfel says in the Cliff Room — named after the Casco Bay island — at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute, where he formerly led entrepreneurship and venture creation. Still tied to the Roux as a mentor in residence, Wolfel often works from its Portland waterfront campus — and other places around town — as he ramps up. “It was one thing when there were three or four of us working out of an apartment and betting our futures,” he says. “Once you start bringing in outside capital, there are risks associated with that, but I take that commitment really seriously.” Corsair has raised an initial $3.5 million from 14 backers for its inaugural fund to deploy immediately, with plans to raise another $20 million. Wolfel expects to close the first two investments this month. Over the next decade, Wolfel aims to fund around 75 companies from three funds and expand the number of backers to more than 50 by the final close. While Wolfel is Corsair’s sole general partner, he’s assembled a team that includes a part-time chief financial officer, an advisory committee and venture partners who help source, evaluate and support founders. Others are busy behind the scenes with their time or capital. Venture partners include Deb Mills-Scofield, a fellow Roux mentor-in-residence who says that “as a serial entrepreneur, Chris understands funding from both sides.” While it’s not unusual for Wolfel to have four or five meetings in a single day, he recently packed in 13, including seven back-to-back on Zoom. That left no time for lunch, save a yogurt and an orange. He also makes the most of quiet time for “deep research.” Wolfel, a board member of the Maine Angels group of investors, likens Corsair to a “super-angel” in agility terms and sees this as a “dot-com moment” for venture capital more broadly. “The financial returns will be made by being early, being contrarian and being willing to stand alone, whether that’s in what you back or where you back it,” he says. “Just like the last cycle, some of the most important companies will come from places and sectors others overlook.”

Building ‘deep tech’ ventures from scratch

While venture capital funds early-stage startups, venture studios step in at a much earlier stage — assembling founding teams to build a business from scratch. That’s the aim of Ateklo Inc., a Portland-based endeavor founded by Justin Hafner and Richard Corey. Hafner, a graduate of the University of Maine, is the founder and former CEO of digital health startup Kinotek, while Corey co-founded and leads UMaine’s VEMI Lab in Orono. They launched Ateklo in 2023 to turn frontier scientific researchers into entrepreneurs, providing initial capital and hands-on operational support for two spinouts so far. The first, Intangible Partners, uses artificial intelligence to help businesses in legacy industries as well as startups and private equity funds streamline administrative tasks and prospect for business leads, while EliVive Inc. is pioneering a wearable platform that will use human sweat to track changes in women’s reproductive hormones with much more precision than blood tests. To lay the groundwork for EliVive, Ateklo connected Portland-based biomedical engineer Liza White with Martina Marrali, a biotechnology scientist in Cambridge, Mass., currently completing her MBA at Babson College. The duo joined forces with Ateklo to start EliVive, with Marrali as CEO and White as chief technology officer. The example illustrates Ateklo’s approach of acting as the “middle layer” between academia and industry to help create startups that address critical industry challenges. “We have a saying internally about how much more we believe in people over patents,” says Hafner, a self-described deep-tech venture builder. “People are what really drive super-advanced technology and frontier research.”

Ateklo — which tailors its ownership take to each company it gets off the ground — uses an “intelligence engine” powered by proprietary data to spot overlooked talent and untapped commercial opportunities and then forms a team to launch and fund a business. “We’re co-founding the business, de-risking it before we even really deploy any serious capital,” Hafner explains. “We feel pretty confident in our model.” Marrali says it would have taken much longer to start EliVive without Ateklo, who “really gave us a direction on how we should think about things.” While Ateklo got its start small contributions from friends and family to test its initial idea, the long-term goal is to grow through external fundraising. “We’re aiming to raise close to $10 million-plus,” Hafner says. “We could maybe do more with less, but that’s what we want to target in the near future to really scale things up.” Ateklo, which has an office at the University of Maine Graduate and Professional Center in Portland’s Old Port, is staffed by a four-person operating team that includes venture capital industry veteran Kevin Compher as chief investment officer. While Compher had already been in Maine, Hafner says Ateklo recruits both within and outside the state “to keep pace with our needs across the platform.” To strengthen connections with industry, Ateklo has forged a strategic partnership with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Corporate Entrepreneurship Network of senior leaders across advanced manufacturing, critical infrastructure, energy and consumer technology. Ateklo expects a busy decade ahead. “To maintain our pace toward a goal of 40 companies over the next 10 years, we plan on starting another two companies over the next 12 months,” Hafner says.

Growth capital without the strings

For startups without the collateral to secure a bank loan — or the desire to cede an ownership stake to a private equity or venture capital investor — Brunswick-based Coastal Enterprises Inc. offers another path. One of CEI’s small-business financing options is a novel debt instrument known as revenue-based financing to provide growth capital that’s repaid as a percentage of revenue. The nonprofit, community development financial institution gets its funding from federal sources and from private donors seeking to invest for impact. The arrangement gives borrowers some wiggle room in the early stages of a business, when revenue can swing sharply from month to month or cash flows are strained. Payments rise and fall with income levels, so the debt is repaid as the business earns more. To qualify for a loan, a business must have had at least $150,00 in revenue in the past 12 months. This is how it works: If a borrower is granted $100,000 loan today, it would pay back 1.5 times that amount or $150,000 total over the next five to seven years. Because monthly payments are calculated as a percentage of revenue, the amount increases or decreases as revenue changes. That may be especially attractive to seasonal operations that can shoulder bigger payments when they’re busier. “It’s especially business-friendly that way,” says Amy Leshure, a CEI loan and investment officer who runs the pilot program. Though revenue-based financing isn’t for everyone and is more expensive than a conventional loan, Leshure says it’s more affordable than giving up equity and less cumbersome than taking instructions from a board.

“A lot of entrepreneurs — especially female and BIPOC — often don’t get the kind of money they need from venture, and often don’t want that hyperscale push,” she says. “There’s a growing movement where they’re saying ‘No’ to the venture gold rush.” “I’m not discouraging anyone from raising venture capital,” she adds, “but sometimes people just want to opt out of that rat race.” In less than two years, CEI has provided close to $2 million in revenue-based financing to a dozen businesses based in Maine or with significant operations here. The number includes two deals set to close at the end of this month. Borrowers include WellSort, a Kennebunk-based digital wellness startup that borrowed $100,000 from CEI to build a platform for use by employers and universities nationwide. The funding “came in at a really good time for us,” says Anush Hansen, a licensed professional counselor who founded the business in 2021 to help clients coping with burnout. She created a digital prototype in 2022 and rebranded and incorporated as WellSort in 2024. WellSort, which has also received funding from Maine Technology Institute and other sources, has five years to pay back $150,000 to CEI. The startup would qualify for another $100,000 in borrowing once it achieves a set revenue milestone, says co-founder and CEO Tim Seavey. He and Hansen run the company with six part-time subcontractors in roles from software development to marketing. “As long as we’re in good standing with our current loan, that money is there for us,” Seavey notes. For entrepreneurs hesitant about taking on debt, Seavey suggests considering revenue-based financing with CEI, while his business partner recommends exploring a range of options. “It’s always worth having the conversation,” says Hansen.