Ayah Bdeir

Remember playing with LEGOs? Well, what if those LEGOs could show kids how to build circuits that actually work and turn them into little engineers?

At 29, Ayah Bdeir launched littleBits.

A kit of magnetic, color-coded electronic blocks that kids could snap together to build working circuits.

Just invention, made stupidly simple.

In 2011, she sold her first prototype at a Maker Faire.

In 2012, she gave a TED Talk that’s now been viewed over 1M times.

Then she scaled.

She raised $70M from VCs like True Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Foundry Group, and Vegas Tech Fund.

She partnered with Disney, NASA, and Pearson.

She joined the Disney Accelerator.

She built STEM kits used in 20,000 schools across 70+ countries.

And in 2019, she sold the company to Sphero.

By then, 20M Bits had reached kids, parents, teachers, and artists around the world.

And 40% of those kids? Girls.

But Ayah wasn’t just “building toys.”

She also deeply cared about the future of education.

A graduate of the American University of Beirut and MIT Media Lab, she coined the term “electronics as material” and helped define the Open Hardware movement.

She co-founded the Open Hardware Summit (now the world’s largest open-source hardware community) and helped establish the CERN Open Hardware License.

Her inventions sit in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection.

She holds over a dozen patents.

In 2019, when protests erupted in Lebanon, she returned home and co-founded Daleel Thawra.

A digital platform connecting 45,000+ activists, donors, and organizers for the Lebanese Revolution.

She’s been named…
- One of MIT Tech Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35.
- A BBC 100 Most Influential Women.
- An Inc. Top 100 Female Founders.
And she’s been featured on 60 Minutes, TED, and the covers of WIRED, NYT Magazine, Marie Claire, and MAKE.

Today, she leads AI strategy at Mozilla.

Driving initiatives in open-source AI and launching new platforms like Mozilla.ai Blueprints and Mozilla Data.

She’s also a board member for NYC’s Fund for Public Schools, supporting 1,800 schools in the nation’s largest district.

And she’s raising a 3-year-old who’s constantly testing her decade of work encouraging kids to be “mischievous.”