Indian origin 12 year old turns her father's business problem into a global AI startup

A 12-year-old student from Kelowna, British Columbia, has drawn global attention after building an artificial intelligence startup that helps small businesses answer customer calls around the clock.

Mana Jampala, founder of Voxa, created the AI-powered receptionist after seeing her father's workplace miss customer calls during busy hours. Today, the platform has deployments in Canada, India and Cambodia and is expanding its reach.

Jampala's interest in technology began in childhood. After learning the basics through Scratch programming camps, she taught herself Python at the age of nine. Two years later, she was building AI software to solve practical business problems.

Her work earned her a grant from the 1517 Medici Project and a special award at a collegiate-level science competition in India.

While spending time at her father's business, Jampala noticed employees were often too busy to answer incoming calls, causing potential customers to be lost. She decided to build a virtual receptionist that could respond at any hour without requiring additional staff

Voxa is designed for service businesses such as restaurants, pharmacies and other small enterprises. The system can answer customer calls, schedule appointments, record restaurant orders, manage missed calls and generate summaries after conversations.

According to Jampala, the platform is already handling hundreds of calls as it continues to expand.

Despite her age, Jampala has approached the startup much like experienced founders. She has said she used AI coding tools such as ChatGPT and later Claude to generate small pieces of code, which she tested and refined herself instead of relying on AI to build the entire product. She says this helped her understand every part of the software while developing her own backend over time.

Building a business at 12 has also brought challenges. Jampala has said many potential customers initially focused on her age rather than the product, prompting her to shift more of her outreach online, where conversations centred on what the software could do.

She now plans to continue growing Voxa, develop its AI agent platform, and eventually join a startup accelerator before seeking investment.

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