# 12-year-old founder launches AI receptionist for small businesses

> Source: <https://letsdatascience.com/news/12-year-old-founder-launches-ai-receptionist-for-small-busin-7a1e0678>
> Published: 2026-07-08 09:37:13+00:00

Business Insider reported July 8, 2026, that **Mana Jampala**, a **12-year-old** founder in British Columbia, launched Voxa as a 24/7 AI receptionist for small businesses in November 2025. The article says Voxa answers calls, books appointments, records orders, manages missed calls, and creates call summaries, and that Jampala is pursuing the first paying customer after handling hundreds of calls. For practitioners, the story is a low-scale but useful signal: hosted coding assistants and voice-agent tooling are compressing the path from prototype to customer-facing workflow, while making reliability, privacy, and escalation design more important.
