E-liza Dolls, a Berkeley-based startup, is aiming to challenge the gender gap in STEM by helping young girls learn to code using dolls. The company, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, builds dolls that include programmable computers that girls can code through an app.
The startup was founded in 2021 by Eliza Kosoy, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, who is focused on the intersection of child development and artificial intelligence. Kosoy originally came up with the idea for the dolls in 2017 while she was working at MIT in an AI lab that was mostly made up of men. Kosoy says she realized that if only a certain group of people were de …
