James Zammit

James Zammit is cofounder and CEO of Roark, a San Francisco startup that tests, monitors, and improves voice AI agents. Roark combines call simulation with personas, post-call analysis on dozens of audio-native metrics, and a loop that turns failed production calls into regression tests. Zammit and cofounder Daniel Gauci joined the YC Winter 2025 batch after building the product from Malta roots into the Bay Area.

From Malta engineering to AngelList infra

Zammit is a Maltese engineer with more than a decade of experience. At AngelList he worked on core portfolio infrastructure as assets under management grew from about $10B to $124B and led Relay, an AI-powered portfolio manager that processed thousands of financial documents a month. Earlier he cofounded startups, including one showcased at Google I/O in partnership with Firebase. When Roark got into YC, he wrote that YC had been a dream for both founders and that they planned to dedicate themselves fully to building something meaningful.

Voice QA after calling the clinic bot by hand

The Roark founding story starts with a dental-clinic voice agent: patients got stuck in loops or failed insurance confirmation, and the only way to test fixes was to call the bot or skim transcripts. Zammit and Gauci heard the same pain from other voice teams and built Roark as the QA layer - ingest production calls, replay them against new logic, score goal completion and vocal cues like frustration or long pauses, and alert on regressions. Gauci previously helped scale Akiflow and led mobile work at Casumo.