RALEIGH – Quinten Farmer’s startup story might sound a little familiar.

At 19, he drops out of NC State University (NCSU) to make his fortune early. Eventually he lands in Silicon Valley and after a few years of hustling, he strikes gold co-founding the financial wellness company, Even.

Now on the fast track, the startup has already secured deals with Walmart and the software company Kronos, while tripling its staff from 16 to 70 employees in just the last year.

Most recently, it opened a second office in Raleigh.

“We knew we needed an East Coast presence given where our client base is,” the 28-year-old Raleigh native and Even’s chief operating officer told WRAL TechWire.

“You narrow it down to reasonable places to live and cost of living, it might be Raleigh, Atlanta, maybe a couple of the Florida cities. At that point, all else being equal, I’d rather it be a place that I want to spend time.”

Even’s Raleigh team.

It’s yet another example of a growing trend that has seen companies looking elsewhere for second headquarters outside of Silicon Valley, largely due to the high cost of living.

“That’s very much a hot topic for companies in the Bay area,” Farmer said. “Austin has already experienced this. Seattle has. And I certainly see this happening here as well.”

And they’re hiring. With around eight positions to fill, they’re looking for candidates across a wide range of roles — including partner success, enterprise partner management, engineering, member operations team and finance.

Helping people master their money

Monday night the company opened its doors to the public to get a peek inside.

As part of this month’s Big Top Startup Crawl, more than 100 people packed inside Even’s third floor industrial office space on East Hargett Street to hear about the company’s early beginnings.

It all started back in 2014 when a group of four founders –  also including Jon Schlossberg, Cem Kent and former Instagram engineer Ryan Gomba – realized a need in the market “to end the paycheck to paycheck cycle that impacts 78% of all U.S. workers”.

“We saw that the math of being a middle-class, normal American family was getting much harder,” Farmer explained.

“People’s incomes haven’t changed all that much over the last 20 years, but people’s expenses have gone through the roof. Our point of view is that you need a product like ours to help fight that battle for you.”

After nearly two years of prototyping and testing, the team developed an app that integrates with company time and attendance, payroll and banking systems, making it easier to plan ahead for bills and saving goals.

It also offers an “Instapay” feature that allows employees to access some of their wages before payday in case of a financial emergency.

Walmart comes knocking

Farmer believes it’s this “holistic” approach to budgeting that sets them apart from other budgeting apps.

And after some early press, Walmart came knocking.

“In our early conversation with them, it was very much, “Hey, we are early. We’re are serving 50 people; you are 1.6 million people’. But they were great partners and basically said, let’s figure what this looks like together.’”

Initially, they raised $3 million in a seed round, followed by $9 million in a Series A round and another $40 million in a Series B round shortly after the Walmart deal.

By 2017, they were ready to launch their product and it took off.  They had hoped for around 5 percent engagement. In the end, they exited the year with around 25 percent.

“Walmart has over 250,000 of their employees using Even every single month. That level of engagement and adoption for a financial wellness product just blows away what other companies are doing,” said Farmer.

One of the company’s biggest backers is local venture capital firm, Bull City Venture Partners (BCVP).

“We loved the progress of Walmart that was just starting, and we decided to jump into the [Series B] round and participate,” said Jason Caplain, BCVP’s general partner, who was on hand Monday night to celebrate the startup’s success.

He and Farmer actually go way back. He mentored Farmer when he was a student at NCSU and remained in touch.

Caplain wouldn’t say exactly how much his firm has put towards the venture, but he seemed optimistic.

“It was really based on Jon and Quentin, and how confident we were of the people,” Caplain said. “It continues to be a huge win.”