Meet Voxa: The AI Receptionist Built by a 12-Year-Old in British Columbia

Mana Jampala, a 12-year-old from British Columbia, has built and launched an AI-powered receptionist service called Voxa — a product she conceived at age 11 after watching her father's small team repeatedly miss incoming calls. The platform operates around the clock, handling tasks like booking appointments, recording restaurant orders, managing missed calls, and generating post-call summaries. Though less than a year old, Voxa is already processing hundreds of calls, and Jampala is actively hunting down her first paying customer.

Jampala built the system herself using a methodical, iterative approach: she started with OpenAI's ChatGPT to generate small code snippets, tested each piece individually, then switched to Anthropic's Claude for its superior coding assistance. Rather than rely on third-party agent infrastructure, she eventually constructed her own custom backend. The core system took two weeks to build, but she describes the work as ongoing — a constant cycle of bug fixes and new features.

Her go-to-market experience has been a crash course in ageism. In-person pitches to local businesses routinely derailed into questions about her age and whether a parent was secretly running the show. Online outreach proved far more effective — potential clients focused on the product rather than the founder's age. She's now leaning on warm introductions over cold outreach, including a direct conversation with the CEO of her city's Chamber of Commerce.

Jampala has also launched a companion platform called Voxa Agents, which lets users build their own AI agents using plain-language prompts. Her longer-term roadmap is surprisingly sophisticated for a middle schooler: bootstrap for a year or two, target an accelerator like Y Combinator or Andreessen Horowitz, then pursue venture capital at the right scale. She's already secured a 1517 Medici Project grant — a fund that backs high school students, college students, and dropouts building startups — and won a special prize at a collegiate-level science competition in India. She first got interested in AI at age 9.