Johnny Saye considers himself an expert in failure, he told the Tampa Bay Inno backstage, jokingly, after he won the $5,000 main prize at St. Pete Pitch Night.
Saye pitched his company, FedScribe AI, at the Tuesday event and won the main prize. His company is still in the early stages of development, so the money will go toward establishing a customer base, he said.
FedScribe AI is an artificial intelligence tool for businesses seeking help in applying for Department of Defense contracts. Saye and his co-founders trained an open-source large language model (an AI program) with specific data they learned to be valuable in applying for contracts. It can recommend and tailor an application based on what a company wants to accomplish or apply for, Saye said.
The "special sauce" is the data he compiled from government contract work. But that data and application understanding were learned the hard way — through losing a contract worth thousands of dollars, he said.
Saye's career has been a winding one. After dashed dreams of playing in the NBA as a 5-foot-7 kid from Monroe, Louisiana, Saye went on to play soccer in South America, try his hand at several jobs like radio and reporting, stumble into a consulting job while living in Spain, and ultimately work for IBM. He later founded a startup called Stale Chips, a coaching and engineering consulting company.
The experience and data from consulting in these past enterprises, particularly Stale Chips, is how he realized the niche for a tool like FedScribe AI, which he started creating about four months ago, he said.
"The best way to build a product is to scratch your own itch," Saye said. "So that's what I coach everyone else on. I'm not always good at coaching myself, but we launched that idea to build what we needed to do, and it turned out there's a lot of people who need the same thing."
Tricia Johnson, market executive for St. Petersburg and Clearwater at Regions Bank, judged the competition and saw promise in Saye's concept. Regions is a longtime sponsor of the event, and the bank is proud of how it can help small businesses through events like the pitch night, she said.
"[FedScribe AI] had a bigger scope and really could impact St. Petersburg business," Johnson said. "He did a great job presenting and finding how he's going to help the community."
