From ChatGPT to Claude: How a 12-year-old coded her own AI startup

Twelve-year-old Mana Jampala built her AI-powered receptionist startup Voxa by first using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write small pieces of code, before switching to Anthropic’s Claude, which she said she found more helpful for her workflow.

“Instead of making it write the entire code base in one single try, I like to ask it to do little snippets of code, so I can look at it, test it out if something breaks, figure out why, and then fix it,” Jampala said. “Now, I have this massive code base, which I know works because I’ve tested every small part of it.”

Jampala, based in British Columbia, Canada, launched Voxa in November 2025 to help small businesses handle calls they would otherwise miss. She initially used third-party systems to build her AI agents before moving to a custom-built backend. “The basic system took two weeks, but I’m always adding more code, fixing bugs and adding features,” she said.

Her 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.

Jampala said Voxa is already handling hundreds of calls less than a year after launch, and she has also introduced Voxa Agents, a platform letting users build AI agents through plain-language prompts.