Mana Jampala: The Teenager Serving Businesses Across Three Countries

Most 12-year-olds are figuring out middle school while Mana Jampala is figuring out how to scale her AI startup.

Mana is a Grade 7 student from Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, and the founder of Voxa,  an AI-powered virtual receptionist that helps small businesses answer customer calls around the clock. The platform is already serving businesses in Canada, India, and Cambodia, with a focus on restaurants, pharmacies, and other service-based businesses.

How Mana Started Her Journey

Her journey into tech started early. Mana began with Scratch programming camps before teaching herself Python at just nine years old. From there, she went deep into artificial intelligence, earned recognition in science competitions, and received support through the 1517 Medici Project grant, which backs young founders building startups.

What birthed Voxa

The idea for Voxa came from a simple observation. At eleven, she would visit her father’s workplace and notice how often calls went unanswered. The team was small and constantly busy, and missed calls meant missed customers. Rather than accepting it as a normal business problem, she decided to build a solution.

Voxa handles incoming calls, books appointments, records restaurant orders, manages missed calls, and generates summaries after every conversation. It essentially functions as a receptionist that never clocks out.

Building it was not straightforward. Mana used AI coding tools to help, breaking the project into small, testable pieces rather than attempting to build everything at once. The first working version came together in two weeks, but development has never stopped. She has since moved beyond third-party systems and is building Voxa on her own custom backend.

The Challenges Mana Faced

Pitching the product in person brought a different kind of challenge. Many businesses she approached focused more on her age than on what the software could actually do. However, the reception was different online as people cared about the product.

Finding community also took intention. Not knowing any other young founders in her area, she connected with teenage entrepreneurs through Discord, a move she now recommends to any young founder feeling isolated in their journey.

What is Next For Mana and Voxa

Next on Mana’s list is securing more paying customers and continuing to improve the product. She has also launched Voxa Agents, a platform that lets users build AI agents using simple text prompts, signaling that Voxa is only the beginning.

At twelve, Mana Jampala is not waiting for permission to build. She is too busy shipping..