If your cousin, sibling, niece, child, or friend aged only 13 decides to turn his/her hobby into a profitable venture? Or already have ideas for selling their handmade crafts, creating videos on YouTube, or designing websites? But a big question arises in your minds: ‘Can a 13-year-old really start a business?’
Yes, a 13-year-old can start a business of his own. Nonetheless, minors cannot engage in contracts or merchant accounts alone; consequently, parents will have to take care of the bank accounts and taxation processes. It’s not a case of creating a billion-dollar business in one day but of taking advantage of the chances, solving problems, earning money, and gaining entrepreneurial knowledge. However, could anyone believe that a 13-year-old person launches his/her own business?
There is a lot of misconception in society that entrepreneurship belongs to adults or to those people who have experience, or even to someone with a business education. All these factors can be useful in the future; however, they are not the attributes of entrepreneurship itself. Actually, more than all these features, entrepreneurship begins with a thought and a desire to solve problems.
Entrepreneurship does not revolve around experience and age at all; rather, it’s all about finding an innovative solution to the problem that exists. Irrespective of whether they’re 30 years old or 13 years old, what actually counts is the innovative ability to think. It’s good to start at a young age, as it offers more advantages than starting late. Young entrepreneurs get more time for experimenting, learn from their mistakes, and can also build confidence before they even step into the professional world.
Young entrepreneurs do not start with a perfect business plan or with a huge investment; they begin with a simple idea, small steps, and a passion for creating something new and meaningful. Let’s see about some of the young entrepreneurs who built their business at a very young age:
Jaiwardhan Tyagi (Neurapexai)
A 13-year-old boy walked into Shark Tank India. During the show, he received ₹60 lakh in funding for 5% equity from Aman Gupta for his health-tech startup, NeurapexAI. It is an AI-powered healthcare startup and is designed to analyze medical information such as MRI scans, lab reports, medical images, and patient history to generate clear reports. This aims to make the healthcare data easy to understand and use.
Mana Jampala (Voxa)
A 12-year-old founder from British Columbia launched an AI-powered receptionist named Voxa in November 2025. This aims to help small businesses to manage field calls and avoid missing potential customers. She got this idea after spending time at her father’s workplace. Voxa is a 24/7 voice assistant that can answer calls, book appointments, record orders from restaurants, manage missed calls, and create summaries after every call.
Jainam Jain (Mengo Engine)
Jainam Jain, born in Pune, India, moved to Dubai and is the founder of an AI company called Mengo Engine, and owns an office in Burj Khalifa, a world-famous building in Dubai. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he was a YouTuber posting videos with his sister, focusing on toy unboxing and gradually transforming it to science experiments under the banner JJ Fun Time. Mengo Engine is an AI-powered marketing platform that functions as an automated marketing engine.
Alina Morse (Zolli Candy)
Zolli Candy was founded by an American entrepreneur at the age of 10. The company sells its own creation of candies in the form of sugarless lollipops referred to as Zollipops, hard candy known as Zolli Drops, and taffy named Zaffi Taffy. These candies can be bought on the Internet in about 25,000 stores in the United States as well as abroad, for a total revenue of $6 million in 2018.
In other words, Jaiwardhan Tyagi, Mana Jampala, Jainam Jain, and Alina Morse have shown that, even at a young age, one can start building something useful for oneself and others. It does not matter how young one is when he/she tries something new. The most important thing here is that each of these people was curious about learning something new and then using this knowledge to solve some real-life problems.
There are lots of opportunities for today’s Gen Alpha students. Whatever it is, whether it is starting a business on their own or creating a digital product, everything starts from a certain idea and its implementation. In any case, entrepreneurship for students is not all about making money but more about fostering creativity, self-confidence, leadership skills, and so forth. And one can start being an entrepreneur already at the age of 13.
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