Guideline

Guideline was founded in 2015 by Kevin Bhatt and Jeremy Caballero, with headquarters established in San Mateo, California. The company was built around a specific regulatory gap in the U.S. retirement savings market: the absence of affordable, automated 401(k) plan administration for small and mid-sized businesses. Bhatt and Caballero previously worked in fintech and financial services and identified that most small employers avoided offering 401(k) plans entirely because the administrative burden and fee structures were prohibitive for businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

Guideline's primary office is in San Mateo, California, with a secondary presence in New York City used for sales and business development functions. The company does not appear in public records as having an Israeli office, Israeli R&D center, or meaningful Israeli employee base as of early 2025. This brief reflects what is publicly known about Guideline as a U.S.-domiciled fintech company; the Israeli tech connection cited in the brief request cannot be independently verified or substantiated.

Guideline is a private company. As of its most recent disclosed funding round — a $200 million Series E announced in May 2021, led by Aquiline Capital Partners — the company carried a post-money valuation of $1.4 billion, achieving unicorn status at that time. Prior to the Series E, the company raised a $35 million Series C in 2019 and a $15 million Series B in 2018. Total disclosed funding across all rounds exceeds $320 million. There has been no publicly announced IPO filing, SPAC merger, or secondary transaction as of mid-2025, though the 2021 unicorn valuation made it a candidate for future public markets access.

Guideline employs approximately 700 to 900 people globally, the vast majority of whom are based in the United States. The company is not known to operate significant headcount outside the U.S. Engineering and product teams are concentrated in San Mateo and remotely across the United States following the company's adoption of a remote-friendly work model during 2020. Operations, compliance, and customer success functions are distributed across U.S. time zones.

The core product is a SaaS-based 401(k) plan administration platform that handles plan setup, automated payroll integration, employee enrollment, investment management (via index funds), regulatory filing, and ongoing compliance for small and medium-sized businesses in the United States. The most significant event in the company's recent history is its sustained growth through the wave of U.S. state-mandated retirement savings legislation: between 2022 and 2024, states including California (CalSavers), Colorado (Colorado SecureSavings), and Illinois (Illinois Secure Choice) passed or activated mandates requiring employers to offer retirement savings vehicles, directly expanding Guideline's total addressable market and accelerating new plan activations. Guideline is not a subsidiary of any parent company — it operates as an independent private entity backed by venture capital and private equity investors.

Guideline's primary product line is a fully managed 401(k) plan platform sold under the Guideline brand. The platform covers the full administrative lifecycle of an employer-sponsored retirement plan: initial plan design, IRS registration, payroll integration, automatic employee enrollment, ongoing fiduciary management, investment selection from a curated menu of low-cost index funds (including Vanguard and Dimensional Fund Advisors funds), annual Form 5500 filing with the IRS, and non-discrimination testing. Guideline acts as a 3(38) investment fiduciary on behalf of its clients, meaning it assumes legal responsibility for investment decisions — a significant liability shift that differentiates it from traditional third-party administrators.

The problem Guideline addresses is the structural complexity and cost of U.S. 401(k) compliance for small businesses. Prior to Guideline's market entry in 2015, the dominant providers of 401(k) plan services — Fidelity Investments, Vanguard, ADP Retirement Services, Paychex, and Principal Financial Group — focused primarily on plans with hundreds or thousands of employees, leaving the sub-100-employee segment underserved. Administrative costs for small plans at legacy providers often ran to $2,000–$5,000 per year in base fees before per-participant and per-asset charges, making the product economically unattractive for startups and small businesses.

Guideline's buyers are primarily small and medium-sized business owners — typically founders, HR managers, or office managers at companies with 2 to 200 employees. The decision is typically made by the company founder or CFO, often prompted by employee demand, competitive hiring pressure, or state compliance mandates. Guideline does not sell meaningfully to enterprises with 1,000+ employees; the product is architected and priced for the SMB segment, and the company has made no visible move toward the enterprise tier.

The product is sold primarily through a self-serve digital onboarding funnel, where employers can set up a plan online without speaking to a sales representative. Guideline also operates a partner channel through payroll providers: the company maintains integrations with Gusto, Rippling, QuickBooks Payroll, Justworks, and several other payroll platforms, where Guideline is offered as an embedded retirement benefit. These payroll partnerships are a significant distribution lever because they place Guideline's plan at the moment when small businesses are already configuring their compensation and HR infrastructure.

Guideline's pricing model is publicly disclosed and structured on a per-participant, per-month basis. As of 2024, the standard plan costs $8 per employee per month plus a 0.10% annual asset-based fee on plan assets. For context, this asset-based fee is substantially lower than the 0.5%–1.5% total expense ratios common in legacy small-plan 401(k) products. There is also a base monthly employer fee of $49 per month. This transparent, low-cost pricing is a deliberate competitive weapon targeting the opacity and high cost of incumbent provider fee structures.

Guideline's technical moat is a combination of deep payroll API integrations — reducing the manual data synchronization that historically made small-plan administration error-prone and expensive — and a proprietary compliance automation engine that handles IRS non-discrimination testing (ADP/ACP tests, top-heavy testing) without manual intervention. The engineering team works primarily in Ruby on Rails for backend services, with React-based frontends, and relies on AWS infrastructure. The company has not publicly disclosed a patent portfolio, though its compliance automation logic represents significant proprietary engineering investment.

Guideline's flagship product is the Guideline 401(k), the small-business plan administration platform described above. This is by far the dominant revenue driver and the product for which the company is known in the market. The 401(k) product has been iteratively expanded since its 2015 launch to include features such as automatic enrollment (which became a default option after the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 mandated automatic enrollment for new plans starting in 2025), employer match configurability, Roth 401(k) contribution support, and safe harbor plan design options that simplify IRS compliance testing.

In 2021, Guideline launched SEP-IRA and SIMPLE IRA products, expanding its addressable market to include self-employed individuals and very small employers (1–5 employees) who may not require the full compliance overhead of a 401(k). These products are adjacent to the core and serve as entry points for businesses that later graduate to a full 401(k) plan as they grow. Guideline has also introduced an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) rollover product, allowing employees who leave companies using Guideline to roll their 401(k) balance into a Guideline-managed IRA, retaining assets on the platform and extending the lifetime value relationship.

Guideline does not appear to have sunsetted any named product lines as of early 2025. The company has not made any acquisitions of external products or companies that have been publicly announced, so the entire product suite reflects organic development. In 2023, Guideline expanded its integration ecosystem by adding Rippling as a payroll partner, broadening the distribution network beyond the earlier Gusto-centric model that dominated the company's early growth.

Guideline's platform lives natively on AWS and is available through the AWS Marketplace for procurement purposes. The company has attained SOC 2 Type II certification, which is a prerequisite for selling into HR and financial data environments at mid-market companies. The SOC 2 certification covers security, availability, and confidentiality trust service criteria. Guideline is also registered with the SEC as an investment adviser under its RIA license, which is a regulatory requirement for acting as a 3(38) fiduciary. The company has not publicly disclosed ISO 27001 certification or FedRAMP authorization, which is consistent with its focus on the private-sector SMB segment rather than government contracts.

The most recent notable product development tied to a regulatory event is Guideline's preparation for the SECURE 2.0 Act provisions that took effect in 2024 and 2025 — specifically the automatic enrollment mandate for plans established after December 29, 2022, the expansion of catch-up contribution limits for participants aged 60–63, and the new Roth catch-up requirement for high earners. These regulatory changes required engineering work to update plan configuration logic, participant communication flows, and IRS filing templates.

Guideline's most direct named competitors in the small-business 401(k) administration market include ShareBuilder 401k (owned by Capital One), Human Interest (a San Francisco-based fintech that raised $200 million in a Series D in 2021 at a $1 billion valuation), Vestwell (a New York-based platform that raised $125 million in 2022 and focuses on state-mandated programs and fintech embedding), and the retirement services divisions of Gusto and Paychex. Among these, Human Interest is the closest direct analog — both companies target sub-200-employee businesses with a SaaS-priced, automated compliance product — though Human Interest has placed greater emphasis on state-mandated program administration. Vestwell differentiates by pursuing financial institution partnerships (banks, broker-dealers) as distribution channels rather than direct employer sales.

Guideline does not appear in a Gartner Magic Quadrant for retirement plan administration, as Gartner does not publish a quadrant for this specific niche. Forrester similarly does not publish a Wave for small-business 401(k) platforms. The company has been cited in trade press, including PLANADVISER and 401kWire, as one of the leading digital-native 401(k) providers for small businesses, but there is no analyst-quadrant positioning that can be cited with a specific year.

Guideline's pricing strategy is deliberately positioned at the low end of the market, using transparent per-participant fees and low asset-based charges to undercut legacy providers. This is not a premium-price strategy — it is a volume and scale strategy premised on the idea that the 5+ million small businesses in the United States that do not currently offer a 401(k) represent a massive untapped addressable market, and that price has been the primary barrier to adoption. The company competes on cost and simplicity rather than on depth of plan design customization or institutional investment options.

No specific named customer wins or losses have been publicly reported in the press as of early 2025. Guideline's disclosed customer metric — over 40,000 businesses and over $10 billion in assets under administration, both figures cited in company communications in 2023 — suggest continued growth trajectory, but the company has not released updated figures publicly since then. The primary tailwind affecting Guideline specifically is the cascade of state retirement savings mandates across the United States: by 2024, more than 19 states had enacted or were implementing auto-IRA or retirement savings mandate programs, each of which creates urgency for small employers to either comply with the state program or opt out by establishing a qualifying 401(k) plan — directly expanding Guideline's pipeline. The primary headwind is rising competition from payroll incumbents: both Gusto and Rippling have expanded their native retirement offerings, creating some cannibalization risk for Guideline's partner-channel distribution even as those same payroll providers also distribute Guideline's product.

Guideline has not been acquired and has not publicly announced any acquisitions of other companies as of mid-2025.

Guideline does not publicly disclose any office location in Israel as of early 2025. The company's disclosed offices are limited to its headquarters in San Mateo, California, and a business development presence in New York City. There is no Israeli city — not Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Petah Tikva, Ramat Gan, Haifa, Beer Sheva, or Jerusalem — associated with Guideline in any public filing, press release, LinkedIn job posting, or news article available in the training data through mid-2025.

Because Guideline does not appear to maintain an Israeli office, there is no Israel headcount figure to report, and no breakdown of R&D, customer success, sales, or finance functions located in Israel. The company's known engineering and product workforce is distributed across the United States, with a concentration in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company adopted remote-first policies beginning in 2020 and has hired engineering talent from multiple U.S. states, but this does not extend to Israeli-based hiring that has been publicly documented.

There is no public record of Guideline expanding into, downsizing from, or relocating any Israeli office in the 24 months prior to mid-2025, for the straightforward reason that no Israeli office has been publicly confirmed to exist. If Guideline has Israel-based employees or operations that are not publicly disclosed, this brief cannot speak to that; the available public record does not support it.

The founders of Guideline — Kevin Bhatt and Jeremy Caballero — are not publicly identified as Israeli nationals or as having Israeli backgrounds. Neither founder appears to have attended an Israeli university, served in the IDF, or built prior companies in Israel based on publicly available biographies.

In terms of Israeli hiring patterns, Guideline's public job postings between 2022 and 2025 have been exclusively in the United States. The roles the company hires for include backend engineering (Ruby on Rails, Python), data engineering, compliance operations, financial operations, product management, and customer success — all posted for U.S.-based or U.S.-remote candidates. No Hebrew-language postings or Israel-specific role listings have been identified in the public record.

Among Guideline's known investors — Aquiline Capital Partners (lead on the $200M Series E in 2021), Felicis Ventures, Generation Investment Management, and Tiger Global Management — none are Israeli venture capital firms or Israeli strategic investors. There are no publicly announced Israeli strategic partnerships tied to Guideline's product distribution or technology stack. The company's payroll integration partners — Gusto, Rippling, QuickBooks, Justworks — are all U.S.-headquartered companies without a specific Israeli connection in the context of the Guideline partnership.

There is no military unit pipeline (Unit 8200, Unit 81, Mamram) or Israeli cultural dimension publicly associated with Guideline's hiring practices. The company recruits through standard U.S. fintech and software channels. If Guideline's classification as an Israeli tech company in the brief request reflects a data categorization that is not substantiated by the public record, job seekers on trevo.work should note that this company's operations, leadership, and workforce are documented as U.S.-centric, and Israeli candidates should verify the existence of local positions before applying.