A mechanical engineering student has won the 17th annual Business Pitch Competition at Florida Atlantic University for his artificial intelligence system on fire codes.

A mechanical engineering student has won the 17th annual Business Pitch Competition at Florida Atlantic University for his artificial intelligence system on fire codes.

Daniel Guido, ‘26’, won $2,500 in the student track for his invention FireCodes AI, an AI system that eliminates manual fire codes for buildings. Co-founded with University of Massachusetts at Amherst graduate Krish Malhotra, the system helps fire protection engineers and inspectors search for the necessary codes in a system, eliminating the need to manually search through code books.

“The finalists were extremely competitive and very advanced in terms of their business development and their technological development across all of the tracks,” said Kevin Cox, Ph.D., director of the Adams Center for Entrepreneurship. “We continue to see improvement in the overall quality of applicants, further highlighting the strength of FAU’s entrepreneurship ecosystem.”

Mechanical engineering graduate student Cesar Oeid was runner-up in the student track with Chum Bomb, a patent-pending fishing technique aimed to make chumming more efficient; as well as FAU High School dual-enrolled students Donata Amineva, Jossaya Camille and Makai Pindell for Bioseq AI, an AI tool using smart technology to make medical diagnoses faster.

The Business Pitch Competition is sponsored by FAU’s College of Business and the Adams Center for Entrepreneurship. This year’s competition focused on a student track and a veteran track from the 2024-25 Florida Atlantic Veterans Florida Entrepreneurship Program/BMC Cohort. Hoping to win seed money for their up-and-coming businesses, participants pitched their venture ideas and startups to judges.

Zera Techbridge, a marketplace and service platform connecting veterans, students and institutions to various AI certifications and workforce pathways, earned $1,500 in seed funding in the veteran track. Runner up in the veteran track was awarded to Wall-r, a 3-D printing company creating eco-friendly walls at construction sites. The veteran track was sponsored by the late Eric Shaw, Ph.D., and Office Depot.

Along with prize money, teams competed for the chance to land preferred access into Florida Atlantic University’s Runway (formerly Tech Runway) Venture Program, a public-private partnership that mentors and introduces capital, grants seed funding, to incubate startup companies. The program provides invaluable skills and experiences to launch startups as the next step in their ventures. Some of Runway’s former participants also recently went on to pitch in front of the “sharks” from Shark Tank at FAU’s CrocTank.

The Business Pitch Competition kicked off with an introduction from Andria Beal, EpiPaws founder and winner of CrocTank, and culminated with the Innovation Awards, a ceremony to honor the winners with thousands of dollars in awards given out for the Business Pitch Competition, The Runway at Florida Atlantic, and Florida Atlantic Wave. FAU President Adam Hasner and Daniel Gropper, Ph.D., dean of the College of Business, also attended the ceremony.

For a complete list of runners-up in both competitive tracks, click here .

-FAU-