It used to be that mass-market toys were the purview of the Mattels and Fisher-Prices of the world. But new financing avenues, like crowdfunding, have made it easier for entrepreneurs to get into the market.

Cubetto’s creator, Primo Toys, developed its first prototype for testing in 2013. The next year, the company took the prototype to the Emerge Education incubator, which helps entrepreneurs learn about the educational toys market. In 2015, Cubetto went to the Highway1 incubator, which focuses on hardware development and production, and last year the company raised $1.6 million in a Kickstarter campaign.

Filippo Yacob, the founder of Primo Toys, was hoping to market to toy buyers and retailers when he attended the Toy Industry Association’s New York Toy Fair in February. Mr. Yacob said he was inspired by classic building blocks to have children teach themselves coding fundamentals.

“This block-based programming language looks and feels like a toy but is in fact a procedural programming language,” he said.

He officially started his company on Nov. 20, 2013 — the same day his son was born.

“When I found out that I was going to be a dad, I started thinking about the things I wanted my son to learn,” he said. One of those things was coding, a skill set that Mr. Yacob says he believes is now as critical as reading or math.