Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang famously predicted that artificial intelligence would generate historic levels of wealth, creating more millionaires in five years than the internet did in twenty. From Gen Z to Gen Alpha, there is no one who has managed to escape the illuminating and attractive trenches of the AI boom, turning everyone into coders, creators and entrepreneurs.Mana Jampala, a 12-year-old living in Canada’s British Columbia is currently going viral for her AI creation that has shocked the world. In November 2025, Jampala launched Voxa, an AI-powered receptionist, in order to help small businesses field calls and avoid missing potential customers.
The AI generation
Jampala is among the generation of kids that are growing up in a world that is coming to be dominated by AI. Numerous children like her who have been introduced to the technology have taken a deep interest in it, becoming entrepreneurs at a young age.For her, the interest in AI began when she was all of 9. Since then, she has attended scratch coding camps, learned Python, won a special prize in a collegiate-level science competition while visiting India and earned a 1517 Medici Project grant. The 1517 fund awards grants to high school and college students, as well as dropouts, who are building startups. “I’ve always really been interested in starting a business in the technology field,” she said.While Jampala has friends and is an active athlete, she said that working on her startup has been a solitary endeavour. “I really like it, but sometimes it does feel isolating. In my area, I don’t really know any other people my age doing this,” she said.But as is the magic of the internet, she has found like-minded kids online in spaces like Discord. “I’ve been meeting a lot of awesome people — a bunch of 13-year-olds who know how to code and who are running startups,” Jampala said. “I’d recommend doing that for any other young founders trying to look for a community.”
A product for a need
In her conversation with Business Insider, the teenage wizard said she got the idea after spending time at her father’s workplace. “When I was 11 years old, I would go to my dad’s workplace, and I’d notice they’d miss a lot of calls,” she said. “They’re a very small team, so they’d be super busy. They’d either ignore them or not notice them at all.”While missing a few calls seems inconsequential initially, eventually, they add to lost revenue. This is where Voxa comes in, she said. The 24/7 voice assistant can answer calls, book staff appointments, record restaurant orders, manage missed calls and create summaries after each call.To create an AI-powered receptionist, Jampala initially used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to iterate on small pieces of basic code, which she would review before moving on. Then, she switched to Anthropic’s Claude coding system since she found it more helpful. “Instead of making it write the entire code base in one single try, I like to ask it to do little snippets of code, so I can look at it, test it out if something breaks, figure out why, and then fix it,” she said. “Now, I have this massive code base, which I know works because I’ve tested every small part of it.”Initially, she used third-party systems to build her agents, but now she’s using her own custom-built backend. “The basic system took two weeks, but I’m always adding more code, fixing bugs and adding features. It’s a never-ending process,” she explained.
Child’s play or not?
Founding a company at such a young age isn’t easy. Initially, when she pitched Voxa to local businesses in person, she had her age come up quite often. “The reaction I got was a bunch of, ‘Wait, how old are you?’ And I also got a bunch of, ‘Does a parent help you with this? Is it just by yourself?'” she said.It has been launched for less than a year and yet Jampala claims Voxa is already handling hundreds of calls. Currently, she is focusing on scoring her first paying customer. “Ideally, the trajectory would look something like bootstrapping for a year or two, then getting into an accelerator like Y Combinator or A16z,” Jampala said. “Once I’m done with the accelerator part, I just continue to maintain steady growth. Once I’m at the correct stage, I’ll look toward venture capital and continue to scale.“Along with Voxa, Jampala has also launched a platform called Voxa Agents that lets users create AI agents via prompts. Customers can make use of plain language to get the results they need.Thus, along with pitching people in person, she also tried to reach out to potential clients online. “Their responses were not as age-focused,” Jampala said. “Maybe it was the in-person effect, but these people are a bit more product-focused.”So far, she has tried cold-calling and using her network to meet potential customers. She had a call with the CEO of her city’s Chamber of Commerce for instance. Convincing businesses to use AI in their workflows can also be a challenge, but she’s hopeful. “My strategy right now is to use my connections and ask them for warm intros because they convert better than doing cold outreach,” she said.
