Building a Tech Company in Maine

George Matelich is the co-founder and CEO of Rely, a Portland-based AI platform that automates due diligence for multifamily real estate transactions. Dr. Lisa Belisle and Dr. Jeff Barkin talk with Matelich about what Rely actually does: it ingests leases, rent rolls, contracts and financial records across an entire data room, cross-references them against operating statements, and links every finding back to its source document. A process that typically requires a team of several people working for most of a week can, with Rely, be completed by one person in an afternoon. The conversation covers how that traceability is not just a convenience but a direct response to the skepticism surrounding AI-generated outputs, and why giving users a path to verify every data point is central to earning trust in a high-stakes transaction.

Matelich moved to Maine from San Francisco and chose to build Rely here, and the co-hosts press him on what that choice actually costs and what it offers. He is candid that some venture capital firms discount founders outside major coastal ecosystems, and that access to concentrated talent requires deliberate effort when geography does not supply it automatically. He also argues that his primary customers, large multifamily operators, are concentrated in the Southeast, Southwest and Midwest rather than in San Francisco or New York, which makes his location less of a disadvantage than conventional startup wisdom suggests. He co-founded Nexus Maine, a statewide community for entrepreneurs and business professionals, partly out of the same recognition: the people worth knowing are in Maine, but finding them takes more intention than it would in a denser ecosystem.

The latter part of the conversation broadens into questions Belisle and Barkin bring as physicians: where AI earns trust, where it fails, and what founders navigating high-stakes domains can teach adjacent fields. Matelich describes how Rely builds credibility through low-stakes entry points and steadily earned confidence, and he is direct about the limits of that model when the stakes shift from a financial transaction to a person's health. He and Barkin also discuss the psychological weight of founding a company, including the difficulty of separating self-worth from professional outcomes, the discipline of a structured daily routine, and the reality that most ventures do not reach the next funding stage. Matelich's advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, in Maine or anywhere, comes down to a single principle: talk less, ask better questions, and act on what you learn.