Meet Mana Jampala: The 12-year-old who learned Python at age 9 and built Voxa, an AI startup helping businesses in multiple countries avoid missed calls and customers
The young founder’s journey went viral as people around the world learned how his father turned a problem he identified at work into an AI initiative already used by businesses in many countries.
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Who is Mana Jampala?
Mana Jampala is a Grade 7 student from British Columbia, Canada, who started exploring coding at a very young age. His interest began with Scratch programming camps before teaching himself Python when he was just nine years old.
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Since then, he has immersed himself in AI, gained recognition in science competitions, and received support through the 1517 Medici Project grant, which supports young founders of startups.
Despite balancing school, sports, and friendships, Mana devoted much of his free time to developing AI products and learning software engineering.
How did Mana Jampala come up with the idea for Voxa?
Voxa’s inspiration came from a simple observation at his father’s workplace. “When I was 11 years old, I went to my dad’s work and noticed they were missing a lot of calls,” he told Business Insider. “They’re a very small team, so they get very busy. They either ignore them or don’t notice them at all.”
He realized that every unanswered phone call could mean a missed customer and lost revenue. Instead of treating this as an everyday business problem, Mana decided to build an AI solution.
What is Voxa?
Voxa is an AI-powered virtual receptionist that answers business phone calls 24 hours a day.
The platform can:
- Answering customer calls
- Make an appointment
- Save restaurant orders
- Manage missed calls
- Create summaries after each conversation
- Help businesses automate customer interactions
According to Mana, the platform currently serves businesses in Canada, India and Cambodia, focusing on restaurants, pharmacies and other service-based businesses.
How did Mana Jampala found her artificial intelligence startup?
Mana said that he used artificial intelligence coding tools as assistants when creating Voxa. He first relied on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, then switched to Anthropic’s Claude for coding help. Instead of asking the AI to write everything at once, it broke the project into small pieces.
“Instead of having him write the entire code base in one go, I like to ask him to do little snippets of code so I can look at it, test if something is broken, figure out why, and then fix it,” he said.
“I now have a huge code base and I know it works because I tested every little bit of it.” He added that the first version came together quickly, but development never stopped.
“The basic system took two weeks, but I’m always adding more code, fixing bugs, and adding features. It’s a never-ending process,” he explained.
Today, Mana has moved beyond third-party systems and builds Voxa using its own custom backend.
It wasn’t easy to start a startup at 12 years old
Starting a company at such a young age brought with it unexpected challenges. When Mana introduced its product to local businesses, many focused on its age rather than the software itself.
“The reaction I got was: ‘Wait, how old are you?’ There’s also a lot of ‘Does a parent help you with this? Just alone?” he said.
However, he noticed that the businesses he contacted online were paying much more attention to what the product could do.
“Their responses were not age-focused,” Jampala said. “Maybe it was the face-to-face effect, but these people are a little more product-focused.”
Finding a community of young AI founders
Although starting a startup can sometimes feel lonely, Mana said she finds encouragement through online communities.
“I really enjoy it, but it feels isolating sometimes. I don’t know anyone else my age in my area who does this,” she said.
He then connected with other young founders via Discord. “I met so many amazing people, a bunch of 13-year-old kids who know how to code and are running startups,” Jampala said. he said.
“I would recommend this to other young founders trying to look for a community.”
What’s next for Mana Jampala and Voxa?
Mana says its immediate goal is to secure more paying customers while continuing to improve the product.
Looking ahead, he hopes to join a startup accelerator and grow the company steadily before expanding further.
Alongside Voxa, it also launched Voxa Agents, a platform that allows users to create AI agents using simple text prompts.
