Walter McDonald ’27 and Stephen Lim ’27 created OrbitPhone to help small businesses manage calls and appointments.
When Walter McDonald ’27 found himself stranded after his car broke down this summer and his favorite local mechanic was not answering his phone, the University of Rochester student turned his frustration into a business idea. The third-year data science and mathematics double major knew his mechanic did great work but because he was a small business owner, he was often too tied up fixing cars to coordinate logistics with customers.
“I realized that this is a problem a lot of businesses around the country face,” says McDonald. “We are in an automated age and there are easy solutions, but a lot of business owners don’t know about them because there’s a technological gap.”
After getting his car fixed, McDonald teamed up with his roommate Stephen Lim ’27 (majoring in computer science and finance) to create a simple-to-use system that allows small business owners to set up their own virtual receptionist powered by artificial intelligence.
Building the technical foundation
McDonald gained crucial experience in voice systems and natural language processing over the summer working for Soleo Communications, a position he secured through the summer internship program at the URochester-based New York State Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He was tasked with building AI voice systems that could take vocal instructions from customers, map them to back-end systems, and determine what insurance policies best matched the customers’ needs. He used many of the same concepts he learned at Soleo for OrbitPhone.
After a few months of development, McDonald and Lim launched their company OrbitPhone in late November.
Answering every call
OrbitPhone provides a human-like assistant that can answer calls and book appointments, syncing to a client’s digital calendar and providing quick summaries of each transaction. The product promises an easy setup that takes less than two minutes, and if a client already has a website the system can scrape it for information to make the process even faster.
While products offering AI receptionists for large companies already exist, McDonald says OrbitPhone is intended to fill a gap in price point and ease of use for the small business market.
Ariel Herrera-Molina, who owns Guava Spa in Homer, New York, was among the first to sign up for OrbitPhone. She and her employees are all estheticians who are often too busy with clients to answer phone calls. She said a mentor had advised her to explore using AI to help her business, and she was excited when URochester students reached out with a potential solution.
“I run a spa and I’m the one doing the work, so I am in services all day long—I’m checking clients in and out, I’m doing the marketing, I’m doing everything,” says Herrera-Molina. “It’s literally impossible for me to be there answering the phone. I know that sometimes people are intimidated when they just get a voicemail, and sometimes they hang up before actually leaving a voicemail. I was hoping to find something to help capture any leads that I was missing.”
Expanding access to AI tools
McDonald and Lim hope their product can help level the playing field for small, local businesses trying to compete with larger corporations.
“We want to augment what people can do and democratize the technology,” says McDonald. “It’s not fair that larger companies are able to capture every single customer call and get all this valuable data while smaller businesses don’t get the same opportunities.”
Since OrbitPhone launched, McDonald and Lim have been working to incorporate feedback from their customers to enhance the product. They plan to add features such as more voice customization and outbound calling to help clients follow up on leads.
Lim says starting a company like this is a dream come true, fusing his interests in both software programming and business. He says URochester’s open curriculum gives him the flexibility to pursue both paths, and he is glad to have found in McDonald a collaborative friend and business partner with whom he can work toward a shared goal.
“It’s a whole learning process as we’re building this and figuring things out ourselves,” says Lim. “I love getting first-hand, practical experience building a product. How can you not get excited to build something like this? It’s what I came to school for.”
