12-year-old’s AI receptionist startup Voxa eyes Y Combinator after bootstrapping

Mana Jampala, a 12-year-old based in British Columbia, Canada, launched an AI-powered receptionist called Voxa in November 2025 to help small businesses avoid missing customer calls. The 24/7 voice assistant can answer calls, book staff appointments, record restaurant orders, manage missed calls and generate call summaries.

Jampala said she got the idea after noticing her father’s small workplace regularly missed calls because the team was too busy to answer. She has since also launched Voxa Agents, a platform that lets users build AI agents using plain-language prompts.

Speaking to Business Insider, Jampala said her plan is to bootstrap the business for a year or two before applying to an accelerator such as Y Combinator or a16z, and eventually pursue venture capital funding as the company scales. She said Voxa is currently handling hundreds of calls, and she is focused on landing her first paying customer.

Jampala’s interest in AI began at age 9, and she has since attended coding camps, learned Python, won a special prize at a collegiate-level science competition in India, and received a grant from the 1517 Medici Project, which funds startups built by high school and college students.

She initially built Voxa using third-party systems before moving to her own custom-built backend, coding it using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and later Anthropic’s Claude. “I like to ask it to do little snippets of code, so I can look at it, test it out if something breaks,” she said.