While most 12-year-olds spend their free time balancing schoolwork, sports and friends, Mana Jampala is doing all that while also leading an artificial intelligence startup with operations across three countries.
The Grade 7 student from Kelowna, British Columbia, is the founder of Voxa, an AI-powered virtual receptionist designed to help businesses avoid missing customer calls. According to her LinkedIn profile, the platform is already being used in Canada, India and Cambodia, making her one of the youngest AI entrepreneurs to gain international attention.
A coding journey that began at nine
Mana's interest in technology started at an early age. She first learned programming through Scratch coding camps before moving on to Python at the age of nine. By 11, she had begun developing her own AI-based products.
Her work quickly earned recognition beyond the classroom. During a visit to India, she received a special award at a collegiate-level science competition. She also secured funding from the 1517 Fund's Medici Project, which supports young startup founders.
Despite managing a growing business, Mana says she continues to enjoy playing football, spending time with friends and connecting with other young innovators.
A missed phone call sparked the idea
The inspiration for Voxa came from observing her father's workplace.
She noticed that employees frequently missed customer calls because they were occupied assisting people in person, resulting in lost business opportunities.
That experience led her to create Voxa, a 24-hour AI voice assistant aimed at businesses such as restaurants, pharmacies and other customer-facing services where unanswered calls can directly impact revenue.
The platform can answer incoming calls, schedule appointments, take restaurant orders, manage follow-ups and generate conversation summaries after every interaction.
According to Mana, Voxa is already managing hundreds of customer calls while expanding its presence across Canada.
Learning with AI, not depending on it
Speaking to Business Insider, Mana said she used AI coding tools such as ChatGPT and later Claude during development but never relied on them to generate the entire product.
Instead, she produced small sections of code, tested each one thoroughly, fixed bugs independently and gradually built the software's backend herself. She believes this method allowed her to fully understand every component of the platform.
Looking ahead with AI agents
Mana is now focusing on her next project, Voxa Agents.
The platform enables users to create autonomous AI agents by simply describing a task in natural language. These agents can monitor competitors, prepare meeting briefings, track online discussions and perform other tasks automatically.
She hopes to continue expanding the company, gain admission to a leading startup accelerator and eventually scale the business further.
At an age when many students are only beginning to think about their future careers, Mana Jampala is already building AI products used by businesses across multiple countries, reflecting how the next generation is entering the field of artificial intelligence earlier than ever before.
