Today we’d like to introduce you to Urooj Maree Baloch.
Hi Urooj, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I didn’t grow up dreaming of building an AI company. I grew up watching, from what felt like seven seas away, the people I quietly believed were the more successful version of me.
I was in Pakistan then. Tony Robbins. Dean Graziosi. Later, Billy Gene teaching marketing, then his AI cohorts as the world shifted. I sat in on masterminds. I bought courses I could barely afford. I read late into the night. I couldn’t reach the rooms those people were standing in, but I could listen. And I could learn. And I promised myself that whatever they were teaching, I’d carry it back with me — not just for me, but for someone else who needed a way in.
Before all of that, in 2011, I traveled to Montreal to study an intensive diploma in Human Resource Management, right after finishing my MBA at home. It was the first time I’d been out of my country. I came back full of ideas — and made a choice that surprised most people around me.
I took a lecturer position at Govt. Nazareth Degree College in Hyderabad. A government-funded college for young women, most of whom couldn’t afford the fancy private universities in our city. Their families sent them to us because we were what was available. I stayed there for over a decade.
I stayed because I understood something about those girls that a lot of people missed. They didn’t need someone to tell them to dream bigger — they’d been told that their whole lives. They needed someone to show them the road to the dream. A map. Not just “believe in yourself” — but “here’s exactly what to do on Monday morning.”
Some of my students started freelancing before they’d even graduated. A few opened their own stores on daraz.pk. Watching them build things with their own hands, in a country that hadn’t quite made room for them yet — that’s the part of my career I’m still proudest of. Not the degrees or the papers I later published. That.
Somewhere in the middle of all that teaching, in 2021, I finished my MPhil in Business — the last year of coursework and thesis quietly stitched around lectures and grading and my students’ questions. There was no dramatic version of it. Just late nights, early mornings, and the same discipline I’d been asking my students to bring into their own work.
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Those years I also started painting — abstract, moody pieces I never really planned. I still keep a small Etsy shop for them. It’s the only quiet thing in my life; everything else has always been building.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt this quiet awareness — that God had placed me in front of the right people, the right ideas, the right influences, at moments when I couldn’t have arranged any of it myself. That’s not a small thing. It’s a responsibility. If I’ve been given the exposure and the opportunities, then part of my job is to hand what I can back to the next person.
In late 2025, my family and I moved to Virginia. What brought us was the diversity, and friends we already had here — but what made me stay was Arlington. We rented an Airbnb near Pentagon City for the first month, and I fell in love with the calm of it. The way people talk to each other on the street. The beauty of it in ordinary light. It felt like a city that would give me room to build without being loud about it.
At the end of April this year, I stopped waiting. I emptied years of savings and even more years of quiet ambition into a single project. I called it TonextAI.
It’s an AI workforce built for the businesses I recognize most in my own life — the ones being run by one person doing the work of five. The roofing contractor who takes calls from the top of a ladder because whoever picks up first wins the job. The dentist worrying about the new patients whose voicemails no one heard. The salon owner who hasn’t taken a real vacation in years because the business can’t run without her physically there. TonextAI is five AI agents — for calls, chat, booking, follow-ups, and reviews — that quietly do what a full front desk would do, so the owner gets to be at dinner. To sleep. To be with the customer in front of them without losing the one calling.
I’ve built it alone. No investors, no team yet — just years of savings, more late nights than I can count, and the belief that if this could exist, someone had to sit down and make it.
There have been steep dips and small rises through it all — days when nothing worked, weeks when nothing landed. Every time, God carried me through it. That’s the honest sentence. Every single time.
If I could say one thing to anyone reading this who’s in a season where nothing seems to be working — please don’t assume you’re losing. Sometimes life is quietly preparing you for work you couldn’t have done any earlier. Watch, learn, take notes from wherever you can, even if the room is far away. And when the moment finally comes to sit down and build, you’ll be ready in a way you couldn’t have been sooner.
Looking back, I don’t see a life I finally reached. I see a life I’ve been given, piece by piece, along a road I never walked alone. I’m grateful for all of it — the setbacks that shaped me, the people who showed up, and every quiet mercy I didn’t earn.
— Urooj Maree B., founder, TonextAI
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It has definitely not been a smooth road. One of my biggest challenges has been balancing raising my children with working the jobs while also trying to build a business of my own.
Financially, it has also been a difficult journey. I have had to be extremely careful with every dollar I earned and invested into the business. Converting my hard-earned rupees into U.S. dollars and then trying to stretch those dollars far enough to build a technology company has been especially challenging. What may seem like a small amount of funding in the U.S. can represent a tremendous amount of work and sacrifice to earn elsewhere.
There were many moments when building the company felt like an uphill battle, because I couldn’t afford to hire experienced people to do everything I needed, I had to teach myself a lot of things I had never even been exposed to before. I spent countless hours learning, taking courses I could afford, trying different tools, and making use of free versions and trials whenever I could. A lot of the time, I was learning something for the first time while also trying to actually build the company with it. It has been a tremendous amount of work. But I kept going because I had a much bigger vision. I didn’t want to simply start another technology business. I wanted to build an AI company that could stand alongside the best solutions available in the world today.
Balancing motherhood, work, finances, and entrepreneurship has taught me persistence, resourcefulness, and patience. Every obstacle has forced me to become more creative to bring out a solution and determined to keep going, and those experiences have become a big part of the person and entrepreneur I am today.
As you know, we’re big fans of TONEXT Ai Solutions LLC. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Tonext AI is a company I built around a simple idea: small and growing businesses should not have to lose customers simply because they cannot afford a large team to answer every call, respond to every message, follow up with every lead, and keep up with everything happening in the business.
I build AI employees that work alongside a business and handle those day-to-day customer-facing responsibilities. They can answer phone calls, respond to messages, book appointments, follow up with leads, collect and respond to reviews, and help keep customer communication organized. The goal isn’t just to give a business another piece of software. I want to give the owner a system that actually helps take work off their plate.
One of the biggest things that has changed recently is how quickly I can get businesses up and running. With our new setup wizard, when someone subscribes, they can get their Nova AI phone receptionist answering their calls right away, while the rest of their AI employees are built and working within about 24 hours. That has been tremendous progress for me compared with where I started.
I also created starter packages because I don’t want Tonext AI to be something only larger businesses can consider. I currently have options such as Nova Starter, Nova & Klara, and Frontline for businesses that want to start smaller before moving into a more complete system.
What I believe really sets Tonext AI apart is the quality behind the AI employees. I don’t want them to feel like a basic chatbot giving generic answers. Each one is carefully trained around the specific business, its services, policies, customers, and the way it wants to communicate. There is a lot happening behind the scenes to make the experience feel natural, useful, and as human as possible. I also continuously monitor the quality rather than simply turning an AI system on and walking away.
What I am most proud of is how much Tonext AI has grown from an idea into something people can actually use and benefit from. I have had to learn an enormous amount along the way, often without the resources to hire people to do it for me. So seeing the technology now become something that can be deployed quickly and genuinely help a business is very meaningful to me.
More than anything, I want people to know that Tonext AI is being built with a very high standard in mind. I don’t want to create another company that simply puts “AI” on the label. I want to build something genuinely useful, reliable, and exceptionally good — something that can compete with the best of what is available in the world today.
“And I don’t know how far I will take it, but I intend to find out, how soon the world is going to see a one-person billion dollar company powered by artificial intelligence.”
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Alongside Tonext AI, I built TechNeeds as another way to fund the vision. It provides practical technology and digital services to businesses that need help getting their online presence and systems in place. The income from TechNeeds.tonextai.com gives me a way to keep investing back into Tonext AI — into the tools, technology, learning, and development needed to keep building toward the much bigger company I envision. In many ways, I am funding my own dream one client at a time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tonextai.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tonext.ai/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/urooj-maree-baloch/
- Other: techneeds.tonextai.com
