AI powers company launched by UR students

Locked away in their suite in the Hill Court resident hall at the University of Rochester, juniors Stephen Lim and Walter McDonald can be found hunched over their computers, working at their AI-powered company. Orbit AI aims to help small businesses increase efficiency. 

An online application, Orbit AI uses artificial intelligence to answer phone calls for businesses and help connect their clients to appropriate services. The app is powered by OpenAI’s GPT Turbo, which handles the AI model’s processing. Then, a realistically sounding AI bot interacts with callers, offering assistance. The application works with various digital calendar apps, such as Google Calendar, allowing the AI agent to book meetings. 

“(Our target audience is) small service businesses that get revenue from the phone (like) locksmiths, financial offices, HVAC people; basically, any business to where a phone call is actually worth a lot,” McDonald says. 

After a business signs up with the company, Orbit AI scans its website and prompts the business to upload any additional documents to Orbit AI’s server, which will be used to train the AI agent. 

The company also can tailor the AI to customers’ needs. 

“(One) customer (said) she wanted a very specific voice, like, she wanted a voice that sounded a lot more natural,” McDonald says. “And so we worked hard to make sure that she had a lot of different voice options to choose from.”

Orbit AI uses outside companies to source its voice models, McDonald adds, which can be done inexpensively.

In the future, McDonald would like to implement a feature that lets business owners have their voices cloned so their voice is the one answering a call.  

Technological wizardry aside, McDonald notes that there still needs to be a business strategy. “We also want to make sure that we’re not just building features for feature’s sake. So, if people demand this (voice cloning feature), we would build it.”

Under a subscription-based business model, the company has just covered its business costs since its launch in December. At the moment, neither McDonald nor Lim receives a salary. Purchasing digital advertising and outsourcing account for most of Orbit AI’s costs. 

McDonald says he and Lim are focused on business growth and intend to reinvest whatever profits they earn—at least for the near future. 

Lim expects the company to continue research and development over the next year. McDonald, who serves as Orbit AI’s CEO, says he hopes profitability will grow over time. 

“Buying and setting up things is always more expensive than just having them running,” he says. “So, hopefully as we continue to run and scale, our operating costs are going to go down a lot more.”

All initial costs were covered out of pocket by the founders, who have been working on the project since November 2025. 

So far, 17 firms have signed on to Orbit AI’s beta version. Orbit AI is receiving feedback from these companies on how it can improve its service and navigate unforeseen problems that arise.  

For instance, McDonald says, “we’ve had an issue where we didn’t have credit card fees implemented when you signed up. We would just let anyone sign up.” Soon, the company was flooded with requests from what the two suspected were bots. To circumvent this issue, Orbit AI stopped allowing customers to use a 1-800 number to register their businesses, a common tactic used by fictitious customers. 

While McDonald and Lim are entrepreneurs, they are also college juniors. 

“One of the difficulties is balancing school and work at the same time,” says Lim, chief operating officer. “And so when we are spending time building towards this, we want to make sure that everything that we are contributing is, like, correctly valuable.” 

While money is a major start-up need, he notes that time is an even bigger one—which is often overlooked when people think about the costs of launching a business.

“I’m going to be completely honest, I put my professional work above school,” McDonald says. “I still do well, but certainly I’ve sacrificed nights of studying to work on developing instead. Going all in or all out has always been one of my challenges. … I love what I do, and so I pursue it pretty relentlessly.”

At the same time, being students has also opened the door to a lot of help that they might not have had access to otherwise. Like Simon Business School professor Dan Keating, who teaches courses in AI, analytics, and product management. 

“He’s been supportive of us from day one,” McDonald says. 

Keating has helped forge business connections and often serves as a sounding board for ideas, Lim adds.

McDonald encourages others to follow their ambitious example.  

“I would say the best piece of advice is look at what you can use for free,” he says. “There’s so much tech that you can, there’s so much open source stuff on the internet.” But, he adds, “you (need to) know how to repurpose it, because it’s not going to work out of the box.”

Teddy Almond is a student at the University of Rochester.

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