Tell us a bit about yourself
Alexandra Grigore, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Simprints. Alexandra has a PhD in nanoscience from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar. Previously she worked at the Max-Planck Institute in Munich and the Atomic and Molecular Physics Institute (AMOLF) in Amsterdam. She is a 2015 Top 200 Movers & Shakers in BioTech, 2017 Women in Tech winner, and 2017 Top 50 Movers and Shakers in BioBusiness.

Simprints was born out of a hackathon during my PhD five years ago and it’s exciting to have watched it grow at an exponential rate since then. It has been an incredible learning experience for me to be a part of the technology for development space and to work in a company that is geared towards making a dent in the world! 

How is your venture doing?
We celebrated Simprints’ 5th birthday in February! I remember our initial days from IdeaSpace when we were a scrappy startup with a team of 5 -- it’s incredible that we have grown to a team of 40+ now and have regional offices in two additional countries (Bangladesh and Ethiopia). Over the years we’ve made a difference to the lives of ~400,000 beneficiaries across 12 countries and are on the path to impact ~1m in the next couple of years. 

What advice do you have for other founders?
I think my key learning has been that having a community is very important: when I say this, I mean both the community that you work with and the larger tech4dev community that supports us with valuable advice! 

How has being part of the ideaSpace community been helpful to you? 
The IdeaSpace community was a very motivating space for us -- we truly enjoyed working alongside other extremely talented entrepreneurs and learning from them! It was at IdeaSpace that we found our first mentors and the first few people who believed in the work we were trying to do. 

To find out more about Simprints visit their website here.