Romanian co-founds nonprofit building affordable biometric technology

Romanian Alexandra Grigore is one of the founders of the Cambridge-based tech nonprofit Simprints, which has developed an affordable open-source fingerprint system to be used for people who do not have identification papers. The company is building fingerprint scanners of which it says that they are “228% more accurate than existing mobile scanners in low-resource settings.” The devices generate fingerprints that serve as a unique and secure ID that cannot be forgotten or lost. They have been tested in Zambia, Benin, Nepal, and Bangladesh in both urban and rural contexts. The system also allows organizations to skip the paper-based system of keeping archives and move to a mobile system. Simprints is currently working with charities in Kenya to provide digital healthcare records for people in poorer communities and who don't have ID cards or birth certificates, CNN reported. “The biometric technology is enabling a lot of charities and organizations to leapfrog a computer-based system and go straight from a paper-based system to a mobile system,” Grigore told CNN, which featured Simprints recently. Alexandra Grigore graduated from the Bucharest Polytechnic and the Academy of Economic Studies. She went on to receive a Masters’ from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and a PhD in Nanotechnology and Healthcare Biotechnology from the University of Cambridge. She is now a Director of Innovation with Simprints. The impact of the nonprofit’s work has been recognized by large charities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Simprints received a USD 2 million innovation prize “to prevent maternal and child deaths in the hardest-to-reach regions of the world.” The award came from Saving Lives at Birth, a 'Grand Challenge for Development' funded by the Gates Foundation, USAID, UKaid, and the Canadian, Korean, and Norwegian governments. The co-founders of Simprints were also listed by Forbes among the 30 under 30 Social Entrepreneurs in 2016. Toby Norman, the CEO of Simprints, was selected as the 2017 Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the Schwab Foundation, while Business Weekly declared Simprints the startup of the year in 2015. (Photo: Simprints Facebook Page) editor@romania-insider.com