How a 6-Person Startup Landed Google & AT&T — James Zammit, Roark
Voice AI agents are moving from novelty to infrastructure, and the companies building them have a reliability problem nobody talks about. James Zammit co-founded Roark (YC W25) to solve it — and did it with a team of six that counts Google and AT&T among its customers and processes millions of call minutes a month. In Episode 3 of the NoRobots Podcast, Vlad asks him how a company that small lands enterprise clients, and where he thinks voice AI still has no business picking up the phone.
Two startups that were too early
Before Roark there were two others: a music collaboration app in 2015 and a chatbot company in 2018, back when chatbots were universally disliked and the underlying technology simply wasn’t there. James is clear-eyed about why they didn’t work — wrong timing, no domain expertise, and founders who were early in their careers.
Two corrections matter more than the rest. The first is speed. One earlier product took a year and a half to reach its first version, because they wanted it perfect. By launch, either someone had beaten them to it or the thing they’d polished turned out to be something nobody wanted. He borrows an analogy from Michael Seibel: to find a leak in a pipe, you can inspect every inch by hand, or turn on the water and let the leak announce itself.
The second is that they used to believe a great product sells itself. It doesn’t. Distribution and sales matter just as much, and that lesson took a decade.
What Roark actually does
Anyone shipping a voice agent hits the same wall: you change a prompt, and you have no idea what you broke. The only way to find out is to call your own agent, over and over, through dozens of scenarios. James and his co-founder hit this themselves building an agent for a dental clinic, where patients kept getting stuck in loops and failing to confirm insurance.
Roark started as analytics — “the Mixpanel for voice” — and grew into two things: simulation testing that runs an agent through hundreds of scenarios, personas, and accents in parallel inside your CI/CD pipeline, and post-call analysis that scores every real conversation on dozens of metrics and points at what to fix.
How six people landed Google and AT&T
No ads. The mix was outbound to teams building in voice, referrals, published content, and — for some of the larger names — inbound. Then the ordinary sequence: demo, pilot, contract.
The unglamorous truth underneath is that none of that survives a bad product. James keeps returning to the YC line about building something people want: simple to say, hard to actually do.
Twenty agents instead of twenty hires
Roark runs more than twenty internal agents. Three examples give the flavour.
The changelog agent reads the week’s pull requests, drafts the changelog, and takes its own screenshots. Monday morning someone reviews it and sends. Four or five hours of a PM’s week become thirty seconds of attention.
The on-call agent picks up CloudWatch alarms, investigates, and either opens a pull request for a human to review or writes up what it found. The broadcast agent solves a small, real annoyance: Roark keeps a shared Slack channel with each larger customer, and announcements used to mean pasting the same message a dozen times. Now it goes into one channel called Broadcast and fans out, picking up new customer channels by naming convention. Three prompts replaced a job that other companies pay a tool to do.
None of these are impressive alone. That’s the point — they’re the boring work that quietly justifies the next hire.
The unglamorous half: infrastructure
The other half of staying lean is refusing to let engineers lose days to setup. Everything is infrastructure as code, using Pulumi and SST. Every engineer gets a production-like environment with one command, with preview deploys, end-to-end tests, and alerts on everything.
James has worked somewhere that editing a single page meant three days of fighting to get data running. His argument: with today’s coding tools, setting things up properly takes no longer than doing it badly.
Where voice AI should stop
Appointment scheduling, reminders, prescription refill nudges — all fully automatable today, in his view. His line for what shouldn’t be automated is risk-based: if getting it wrong costs a life or a six-figure deal, a human still picks up. Anyone calling in genuine crisis belongs in that category.
He’s equally candid about what still breaks. A bad phone line plus background noise — a human decodes that better. People switching languages mid-sentence. Interruptions, where the hard part isn’t handling them but stopping the agent from rudely cutting the customer off. And pronunciation: ask an agent to read back an email address and watch it mangle the spelling. Entire companies exist to fix just that.
The architecture is shifting underneath all this. For the past year most production systems were cascade models — separate speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech components stitched together. Over the last six months more of Roark’s customers have moved to speech-to-speech models, which handle interruptions so naturally that callers often don’t notice they’re talking to software.
Should the agent admit it’s AI?
James expects regulation to answer part of this, and Roark follows whatever the local law says. His own position is a hybrid: booking a table, nobody cares who answered. Discussing a prescription, probably say it. Finding exactly where that line sits, he admits, is genuinely hard.
His broader thesis is blunter: anyone with a publicly facing phone number will eventually be a voice agent. And there’s an argument that the machine is sometimes better — a legal office that closes at five loses the customer who calls at six, and an agent doesn’t.
Malta, San Francisco, and what YC actually reads
James and his co-founder are both Maltese and moved to San Francisco. His advice on geography: move to where your customers are — New York for finance, London for parts of Europe — but don’t let location stop you from starting. If you won’t relocate, commit to being there a couple of weeks a quarter.
On YC applications, his read is that where you’re from matters far less than where you’ll be during and after the batch. And what they’re really testing isn’t the idea but how you got to it: did you talk to twenty people, do they all have this pain, what are they doing about it now, will they pay. Building blindly on a hunch is the thing that fails.
For the rest of the conversation on where voice AI is heading, see also our episode with Elad Hefetz on how AI is reshaping search and discovery.
Find James at roark.ai or on LinkedIn, and watch the full episode on YouTube.