Welcome to our Ecosystem Highlight series, where you’ll meet the innovators in our vast ecosystem of startup builders from across Florida, who are actively solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Vanja Todorovic, Founder & CEO of MelMat, which helps financial services firms automate complex workflows, take control of their data, and accelerate advisor transitions.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to join, launch, or help grow your company?

I spent 25+ years in financial services, most recently as VP of mortgage compliance at Wells Fargo. I kept seeing high-stakes decisions made on a single AI answer that sounded confident but hid its own uncertainty. I built MelMat so people who can’t afford to be wrong can see where the AI models disagree, not just what one of them says.

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

A single AI answer gives you false confidence and hides the dissent underneath it. MelMat runs four engines in parallel and surfaces exactly where they agree, where they split, and where one is confidently wrong. What excites me is that the disagreement is the product: it’s the thing that keeps an expert from getting burned.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in helping build or scale the company? How did you overcome it?

Building a multi-engine research and synthesis platform solo, from the architecture to the grounding layer to the app, with no team. I overcame it by shipping relentlessly in small pieces, treating every graded output as data, and filing a provisional patent to protect the core before I opened it up.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Growing the base of professional users who live in “can’t afford to be wrong” work — compliance, risk, and advisory — and launching MelMatPro. This B2B tier delivers scored, defensible assessments for private equity, M&A, and real estate decisions.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with someone building or growing a company.

Protect what makes you irreplaceable before you show it to anyone. Reveal capability, not method, until there’s a real agreement on paper.

Why Florida?

Tampa Bay has a fast-growing, tight-knit tech ecosystem that actually shows up for founders, and building here means being close to a community like Embarc rather than being lost in a crowded coastal market.

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