12-year-old founder develops AI receptionist himself

"When I was 11 years old, I often went to my dad's work and saw people missing a lot of calls. The small team was extremely busy. They ignored or completely ignored those phone calls," Jampala, a 7th grade student in British Columbia (Canada), told Business Insider.

A few missed calls may seem insignificant, but over time, lost revenue will add up. To solve it, Jampala came up with the idea of ​​developing an AI receptionist.

Last November, after a period of creation and testing, Jampala released Voxa, a 24/7 voice assistant that can answer phones, make appointments for employees, take restaurant orders, manage missed calls and create summaries after each call. In addition to the virtual receptionist, she also launched the Voxa Agents platform that allows users to create AI agents through commands written in natural language.

The young founder said that Voxa has only been operating for less than a year but has already handled hundreds of calls and is working hard to get its first paying customer. According to Economic Times, the application serves many small businesses in Canada, India, Cambodia, focusing on restaurants, pharmacies and other service companies.

For Jampala, the ideal path is to develop on your own for a year or two, then join a startup accelerator like Y Combinator or A16z. After this period, she plans to maintain a stable growth rate so that when the appropriate time comes, she will call for venture capital and continue to expand the scale.

Jampala belongs to Gen Alpha (generation born in 2010-2024), grew up with artificial intelligence and many other advanced technologies. Interested in AI at the age of 9, she attended a Scratch programming summer camp, learned the Python programming language, even won a special prize in a university-level science competition when she went to India and received a grant from the Medici Project of the 1517 Foundation, an organization specializing in investing in young founders. "I've always been very interested in starting a business in the technology field," Jampala said.

Despite having many friends and being active in sports, Jampala almost built his startup alone. "I really like this job, but sometimes I feel alone. Where I live, I don't know anyone my age doing the same thing," she shared.

However, Jampala found like-minded friends on online platforms like Discord. "I met a lot of cool people, for example a group of 13-year-olds who know how to program and are running startups," the 7th grade female student said.

When first building Voxa, Jampala used OpenAI's ChatGPT tool to write small pieces of basic code, review it, and then continue the process. After that, she switched to Anthropic's Claude because she found it more effective. "Instead of forcing the tool to write the entire code at once, I asked to write small pieces to review, test, and if there are errors, find the cause and fix them. Now I have a huge code repository and know it works well because I have tested each small part," Jampala explained.

Initially, Jampala used a third-party system to build the agent, but has now switched to using a backend system developed in-house. "The basic system took two weeks to complete, but I'm constantly adding code, fixing bugs and adding features," she said, calling it a "never-ending" process.

Jampala's startup efforts encountered many difficulties. Initially, the young founder went directly to local companies to introduce Voxa, but discovered his age was an obstacle. The girl received many questions like "How old are you?", "Do your parents support you or do you do it alone?". Therefore, in addition to meeting in person, Jampala also contacts potential customers online and comments that they often pay less attention to age and focus more on the product.

Jampala combines many methods of finding customers, from marketing calls to leveraging relationship networks. "My current strategy is to take advantage of relationships and ask them to introduce potential customers. This is more effective than suddenly approaching," she commented.

Convincing businesses to apply AI to their work processes is also a challenge, Jampala said. However, the young founder is still optimistic: "I think they are worried that customers will feel uncared for, but I believe that in a few months to a year, people will be more comfortable because many businesses have already applied it."

According to a January report by global venture capital fund Antler, the emergence of generative AI brings a major turning point in the startup ecosystem with increasingly younger founders. The company analyzed 1,629 unicorns (startups with valuations of one billion USD or more) and 3,512 founders globally. As a result, if counting only AI unicorns, the average age of the founder decreases from 40 years old in 2020 to 29 years old in 2024.

According to AInvest, this trend reflects the rapid development of artificial intelligence and young entrepreneurs are taking advantage of generative tools to start a business and expand the scale of their companies faster than before.

"Now, smart people can use many of the tools available and are perhaps less dependent on networks or specific expertise in a field," Fridtjof Berge, chief business officer and co-founder of Antler, told Fortune. He believes that "if you are confident, work quickly, and are not afraid to experiment and iterate, the AI ​​field is very suitable right now."