This 12-year-old founder created an AI-powered receptionist to help small businesses build clientele

For proof that AI is enabling a new generation of founders, look no further than Mana Jampala.

Jampala, who is in British Columbia, is the 12-year-old founder behind the AI-powered receptionist Voxa.

She launched the product in November 2025 to help small businesses field calls and avoid missing potential customers.

Jampala told Business Insider 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,” Jampala 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 a few missed phone calls may seem inconsequential, eventually, the lost revenue adds up.

That’s 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.

Voxa is less than a year old, but its young founder says it is already handling hundreds of calls.

She said she is working on securing its first paying customer.

Jampala has also launched a platform called Voxa Agents that lets users create AI agents via prompts.

Customers can use plain language to get the results they need. “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.” Jampala is a member of Generation Alpha, a cohort that’s growing up with AI and other advanced technology at their fingertips.

Jampala said she first became interested in AI when she was 9.

Since then, she’s 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,” Jampala said.

While Jampala has friends and is an active athlete, she said that working on her startup has been mostly a solitary endeavor. “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.

Jampala has found luck connecting with other like-minded kids on online 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.” Business Insider’s Young Geniuses series spotlights the next generation of founders, innovators, and thinkers trying to reshape industries and solve global challenges.

See more stories from the series here, or reach out to editor Peter Gelling to share your story.

To create Voxa, Jampala initially used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to iterate on small pieces of basic code, which she would review before moving on.

She later switched to Anthropic’s Claude coding system because 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,” Jampala said. “Now, I have this massive code base, which I know works because I’ve tested every small part of it.” Jampala initially 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 said.

Founding a company at 12 years old hasn’t come without hurdles, of course.

Jampala initially pitched Voxa to local businesses in person, but found her age came 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.

So, in addition to pitching people in person, she’s tried to reach 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’s tried a mix of cold-calling and using her network to meet potential customers.

Jampala had a call with the CEO of her city’s Chamber of Commerce, for example. “My strategy right now is to use my connections and ask them for warm intros because they convert better than doing cold outreach,” Jampala said.

Jampala said convincing some businesses to adopt AI into their workflows can also be a challenge, but she’s hopeful. “I think they’re worried that their customers will feel ignored, but personally, I think in a few months to a year, people will be very comfortable with this because lots of businesses are already adopting it,” Jampala said.