Livio Bolzon looked at a six-year-old, looked at JavaScript, and decided emojis were the missing link

Every adult who has tried to learn programming remembers the moment a missing bracket made them feel stupid. Now imagine that moment, except you are seven, and you barely type. This is the wall that kills most kids' coding education, and it is the wall Livio Bolzon decided to simply remove. His answer: let them write code with the one symbolic language every child is already fluent in. Emojis.

It sounds like a gimmick for about thirty seconds, which is roughly how long it takes to understand what Codemoji actually does. The emojis are not the lesson. They are the on-ramp. Underneath, kids are building real web pages with real HTML, CSS, and JavaScript concepts, minus the typo-induced despair. The syntax comes later, once the logic already feels like play.

Edtech the unfashionable way

Livio launched Codemoji in Chicago in 2016, out of the 1871 startup hub, with self-taught developer Chase Engelbrecht building the platform. The timing was contrarian: the flashy money in edtech was chasing bootcamps for adults and tablet babysitting for toddlers. Codemoji went after the awkward, unglamorous middle, first through sixth grade, and the classrooms that actually teach it.

That classroom focus is the moat. Teachers, most of whom have never written a line of code, can run Codemoji lessons without pretending otherwise. The curriculum does the heavy lifting, the kids race ahead of it, and the platform has now put more than 200,000 students through their first real code.

It is a slow, compounding kind of win. No viral moment, no acquisition drama. Just a decade of school districts renewing because the thing works.

The patience business

Selling to schools is famously where startups go to die: long sales cycles, tight budgets, committees with opinions. Building a durable company there takes a founder who measures success in school years, not sprint cycles. Livio has been at this since 2016, which in edtech time makes Codemoji practically an institution.

Somewhere out there is a kid who met a loop for the first time as a row of pizza emojis and is now insufferable about their GitHub streak. That is the actual product. The rest is infrastructure.