Scholar recognised on Female Founders 500 list

  • March 27, 2026
Scholar recognised on Female Founders 500 list

Alexandra Grigore has been named in Inc. Magazine's Female Founders 500 list

Alexandra embodies that every day, driving the partnerships and strategy that bring inclusive digital identity to the communities that need it most.

Simprints

Gates Cambridge Impact Prize winner Alexandra Grigore has been recognised on the 2026 Inc. Magazine Female Founders 500 list.

The list honours women who are building meaningful organisations and leading with purpose. Alexandra is Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of Simprints, the world’s first open-source biometric ID platform with privacy at its core. Her recognition comes for “achieving more than one million enrollments for the nonprofit and partnering with GAVI to launch a malaria vaccination programme”.

Alexandra [2012] co-founded the non-profit company at Cambridge with two fellow Gates Cambridge Scholars, Toby Norman and Dan Storisteanu and Toby’s brother Tristam. Alexandra met Toby and Dan in her first week at Cambridge during the Gates Cambridge orientation.

To date, over 3.5m people are enrolled with Simprints and the company has been working in 17 countries. It builds technology to radically increase transparency and effectiveness in global development, the aim being to ensure that “every vaccine, every dollar, every public good reaches the people who need them most”.

Simprints says of Alexandra’s recognition: “Alexandra embodies that every day, driving the partnerships and strategy that bring inclusive digital identity to the communities that need it most. Congratulations, Alexandra. This is well deserved.”  

Latest News

Learning to lead in Law

Ifeanyi Umunna has just been elected student body co-president at Harvard Law School for the 2026–2027 academic year. It’s a role that positions her as a central figure in student […]

Scholar publishes first book

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has published her first book, a hybrid work of lyric non-fiction, which deals with issues ranging from gendered violence and control and intergenerational silence to the politics […]

Gates Cambridge Originals: Luis Briseño-Roa

Luis Briseño-Roa’s career path – like many – has not been a linear one. He started in natural sciences and worked his way through biochemistry, neuroscience, biotech and finally pharma […]

Scholar’s thoughts on Hugging Face widely cited

An article written by Scholar Eryk Salvaggio that questions the prevailing narrative about the Hugging Face incident has been cited in major newspapers, from the New York Times to the […]