Jason Tielve on Using AI to Disrupt Fire Protection Design.
ValiantCEO sat down with FireDesign.ai founder Jason Tielve to talk Army discipline, a stalled industry, and what NFPA-grade automation actually looks like.
FireDesign.ai founder and CEO Jason Tielve was recently featured in ValiantCEO, where he spoke with Jerome Knyszewski about the path from U.S. Army veteran to fire protection trade to founding a software company built to fix one of construction's most stubborn bottlenecks.
A few of the threads Jason pulls on in the interview:
- Why the industry stalled. Fire protection design moved from hand drawings to CAD in the early 2000s — and then largely stopped evolving, even as regulations tightened and the talent pipeline shrank.
- Augmentation, not replacement. The real risk isn't AI taking engineers' jobs; it's not having enough qualified engineers to meet demand. FireDesign.ai shifts their time from repetitive production work to oversight, judgment, and compliance.
- Three layers of trust. In a life-safety environment, every output is grounded in verified NFPA-aligned inputs, constrained by code-tied logic, and signed off by a licensed engineer.
- Lessons from scaling 24/7 Fire Protection from $600K to $20M — and why the same people-first leadership translates to a SaaS team (office puppy named Peaches included).
- What's next. A U.S. launch, Canadian expansion, EU patent protection, and the 2026 NFPA Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.