At an age when most pupils are still learning the basics of computer programming, Mana Jampala is already trying to solve a problem familiar to many small businesses: unanswered telephone calls.
The 12-year-old Grade 7 pupil from Kelowna, British Columbia, is the founder of Voxa, an artificial-intelligence-powered virtual receptionist. The system is designed to answer calls, book appointments and handle routine customer enquiries. It has reportedly been deployed or tested in Canada, India and Cambodia, though the venture remains at an early stage.
The idea arose from an everyday observation. While spending time at her father’s workplace, Jampala noticed that its small team was often too busy to answer incoming calls. Some calls were ignored; others went unnoticed. Each missed call risked becoming a missed customer.
Jampala concluded that an automated receptionist could help small firms respond more consistently without hiring someone to answer the telephone throughout the day.
She launched Voxa in November 2025. The 24-hour voice assistant can answer customer questions, arrange appointments, record restaurant orders, manage missed calls and prepare summaries after conversations. By July 2026, it had handled hundreds of calls, although Jampala was still looking for its first paying customer.
Her interest in technology began several years earlier. Jampala first encountered coding through Scratch camps and began learning Python at the age of nine. By 11, she was experimenting with artificial-intelligence products of her own. She later won a special prize at a collegiate-level science competition during a visit to India.
She also received support from the 1517 Fund’s Medici Project, which offers small grants to young people building projects and prototypes. The programme is intended to help students and early-stage creators turn ideas into working products.
Jampala built Voxa gradually. She used generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude to help with parts of the coding before developing more of the system’s back-end infrastructure herself. Her experience shows how such tools can lower the first barriers to software development, allowing young or inexperienced programmers to test ideas and build prototypes more quickly.
They do not remove the need to understand programming. A working product still requires decisions about data, reliability, design and how different parts of the software connect. But AI-assisted coding can make it easier for a beginner to move from an idea to an early demonstration.
Jampala has also worked on Voxa Agents, a related service that allows users to create customised AI agents through written instructions. Her description of “agentic squads” reflects a wider industry interest in groups of AI tools that can perform linked tasks rather than answer one request at a time.
Running a venture at 12, however, presents difficulties that coding skill alone cannot overcome. Jampala has said that potential customers do not always take a young founder seriously. She has therefore relied increasingly on online outreach, allowing businesses to see the product before her age becomes the centre of the conversation.
She has also spoken about the isolation that young founders can experience. Few schoolchildren have classmates with whom they can discuss software development, customer acquisition or funding. Online communities, she has suggested, can help young builders meet others working on similar ideas.
Her immediate plans include improving Voxa, forming partnerships and expanding its use among service businesses. She has said that she intends to finance the venture herself at first, apply to an accelerator and consider seeking investment later.
Public attention should not obscure how young the business is. A functioning prototype, several trials and hundreds of calls do not yet make a proven company. As Voxa develops, it will have to answer difficult questions about call accuracy, reliability, privacy, customer retention and the handling of sensitive information.
Its success will also depend on whether small firms are willing to trust an automated system with customer conversations. A voice assistant that misunderstands an order or mishandles an appointment may create as many problems as it solves.
Yet Jampala’s achievement remains notable. She did not begin with a grand claim about transforming artificial intelligence. She noticed a specific problem at a small workplace and tried to build a practical answer.
That combination of curiosity, technical initiative and attention to an ordinary business need explains why her story has travelled beyond Kelowna. Voxa may still be moving from experiment to enterprise, but its young founder has already shown that useful ideas can begin with something as simple as a telephone that nobody has time to answer.
