This Indian-Origin Girl whose family hails from Andhra Pradesh, taught herself Python at nine and has since founded Voxa, a voice agent platform for small and medium-sized businesses
The story of how Voxa came to exist starts not in a startup incubator or a university lab but in a biotech office in British Columbia, where a young girl noticed that her father kept losing customers because no one was available to pick up the phone.
Mana Jampala was around the age of eleven when an idea gained momentum for her. However, she did not stop here and turned her idea into action by establishing an AI firm providing virtual assistants to SMEs by the time she turned twelve.
Learning to Code at Nine
Mana began learning Python at the age of nine, years before most of her peers had considered programming as anything other than a school subject. That early technical foundation gave her the tools to build a working product rather than simply pitch an idea. When she recognised the problem in her father’s company, she already had enough knowledge to start solving it.
Pitching Past the Skepticism
Convincing local businesses to trust an AI solution built by a twelve-year-old required a different approach. Mana found that pitching online removed the initial barrier her age created in face-to-face meetings, allowing her product to be evaluated on its merits before her youth became a factor in the conversation. The strategy worked well enough to get Voxa off the ground.
Balancing School, Sport, and a Startup
Mana leads her company click learning and plays other sports different from the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. The fact that her family is from Andhra Pradesh makes her story quite powerful in India, where she is being noticed a lot these days. The message she wants to deliver is straightforward: time spent on screens does not need to be the same as time spent on passive entertainment.
