Twelve-year-old Mana Jampala, a Grade 7 student from Kelowna, British Columbia, has built an artificial intelligence startup with deployments in Canada, India and Cambodia, emerging as one of the youngest founders developing AI solutions for businesses.
Jampala is the founder of Voxa, an AI-powered virtual receptionist that helps businesses automate customer interactions by answering calls, booking appointments, recording orders and generating call summaries around the clock. The platform was developed to address the problem of missed customer calls, particularly for small businesses with limited staff.
The idea for the startup came after Jampala observed employees at her father's workplace frequently missing customer calls while attending to other tasks. She began learning coding through Scratch programming before teaching herself Python at the age of nine and started building AI applications by the time she was 11.
In addition to Voxa, she has developed Voxa Agents, a platform that enables users to create customised AI agents using natural language prompts instead of writing code.
Her work has earned recognition through a special prize at a collegiate-level science competition in India and a grant from the 1517 Fund's Medici Project, which supports young entrepreneurs building startups.
Despite running a startup, Jampala continues to attend school while balancing extracurricular activities. According to reports, she plans to continue bootstrapping the company before eventually joining a startup accelerator and seeking venture capital to expand the business.
