Meet the 12-year-old coder behind AI receptionist startup Voxa

A 12-year-old named Mana Jampala, based in British Columbia, Canada, has built an AI-powered receptionist called Voxa, designed to help small businesses handle calls they would otherwise miss. Jampala launched the product in November 2025, and it can answer calls, book staff appointments, record restaurant orders and generate summaries after each call.

Jampala’s interest in AI began at age 9. Since then she has attended scratch coding camps, learned Python, won a special prize at a collegiate-level science competition while visiting India, and earned a grant from the 1517 Medici Project, which funds startups built by high schoolers, college students and dropouts.

She said she got the idea for Voxa after visiting her father’s small workplace and noticing the team regularly missed calls because they were too busy to answer. “They’re a very small team, so they’d be super busy,” she said. “They’d either ignore them or not notice them at all.”

To build the product, Jampala initially used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write small pieces of code that she would review before moving on, before switching to Anthropic’s Claude, which she said she found more helpful. She has since moved from third-party systems to a custom-built backend for Voxa and has also launched Voxa Agents, a platform for building AI agents with plain-language prompts.

Jampala said she has found community with other young coders in spaces like Discord. “I’d recommend doing that for any other young founders trying to look for a community,” she said.