Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Ryan Bailey of Myelai Inc., a company that provides software that combines cutting-edge AI technology with deep business understanding to deliver solutions that create real, measurable impact.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

Myelai accelerates sales cycles, optimizes business processes, and drives innovation decisions with its AI-powered intelligence platform, Dendron.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to launch your company?

I spent 10 years in strategy, innovation, and operations consulting across everything from multi-billion
dollar international enterprises to small businesses. In parallel, I exited my first startup in 2017,
earned two masters degrees in Engineering and Strategy & Innovation, spent 3.5 years building
non-invasive blood glucose monitoring technology, went deep into DeFi, started my own
consulting firm, and support AI research with TETRA, the Navy, and Florida Tech on
“Superteams”, essentially how teams self-actualize and collectively optimize their cognitive
workload while responding to disruptions rapidly.

During this time, I also handled accounting and taxes for 50+ high net worth individuals, top
blockchain architects, and leading security lawyers in crypto and mining operations, directed the
revitalization of the Prototype Lab at Groundswell Startups, and worked with startup founders to
refine their ideas and business models from Pre-Seed to Seed.

What inspired our team to launch Myelai was realizing that majority of organizational value lies
in the undocumented areas, the communication silos and gaps between how work is supposed
to be done versus how it actually gets done. I wanted to create something that could step into
any environment, regardless of industry, and create incredible value that leaves people in
disbelief. Dendron became my ultimate platform to scale myself and my team, and now we offer
it to help other consultants and growth businesses do the same.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

We’re solving the discovery bottleneck that every business faces, that cognitive burden of
understanding what’s actually happening in your operations versus what you think is happening.
We’ve vertically integrated everything from process mining to optimization to implementation,
automating that entire discovery phase.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge was conceptualizing something that wouldn’t get wiped out by every new model or architecture update. We incorporated right before the GPT Store launched, and I realized we needed to think 5+ years out, build something that benefits from the compounding nature of AI advances rather than competing with them. The other challenge was communication, helping both my non-technical and technical team members see the vision across knowledge gaps. But those ups and downs only made us
stronger as a team, and now we’re seeing that conviction pay off.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We’re getting pulled by four different customer profiles, but the strongest traction is with AI growth companies using Dendron as a sales enablement and operation scaling platform, helping them shrink sales cycles by 80% and demonstrate ROI in specific business scenarios on the first call. That’s where we’ll likely see exponential growth, scaling in parallel with them and ultimately becoming partners with multiple industry-agnostic AI growth companies simultaneously.

The cool part is that we built a very technical solution that can be scaled, priced, and packaged in different ways. I’m matching the market’s energy, going where there’s least resistance, while always positioning for an exit.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Pre-market everything. Don’t even form a company yet, just ask questions about what problems
people are having. Build conviction around actual problems, then build something small that
solves it and get feedback. Do that iteration cycle over and over with today’s tools. Get people
invested before you even launch, so they’re not being sold something; they’re already part of the
solution.

Obviously, be passionate about it beyond just monetary gains. Make sure it’s an industry or play
that genuinely interests you. But most importantly, remember that business endeavors begin
and end; your spiritual, physical, brain, and social health matter more than the societal
perception of “success”.

Why Tampa Bay?

I worked at Groundswell Startups for about a year and a half and really
enjoyed my interactions with Tampa Bay region stakeholders during that time. It’s super
collaborative and feels like what the next growth stage for any emerging market could look like.
It’s not over hyped, it’s realistic and authentic. There’s a lot of room for growth and lots of growth
companies, which makes it perfect for us. The people, business opportunities, and overall
exposure have been incredible. Tampa Bay is, undoubtedly, the next best step for our
organization.