About Me

I am the co-founder and CTO at Footprint, and we're on a mission to solve fraud and financial crimes. The movement of money underpins all criminal activity across the world. Every bank, financial institution, marketplace, or any business that touches money is responsible for making sure bad actors can't abuse our financial systems. Footprint created Percy, our AI risk agent harness, to bring balance and give businesses a fighting chance to discover and stop fraud, identity theft, and financial crimes.

Before Footprint, I co-founded KryptCo (acquired by Akamai). We built Krypton Authenticator (now Akamai MFA) to make strong authentication easy and beautiful. I worked across the stack: cryptographic protocol design, product, UX, and iOS engineering.

I spent 5.5 years at MIT, finishing my undergrad in 2015 and my masters in 2016, both in computer science with a focus on cryptography. I wrote my thesis on Natural Language Processing on Encrypted Patient Data with Shafi Goldwasser.

Company
Footprint ↗Footprint is the AI Operating System for Risk. Our agent Percy investigates identity, fraud, and financial-crime signals the way a human analyst would.
Company
Krypton (Akamai MFA) ↗A phone-based authenticator built on end-to-end encrypted, phishing-proof cryptography, a precursor to passkeys. Akamai acquired it and turned it into Akamai MFA.
Project
tunnelto.dev ↗Expose a local web server to the internet with a public URL, on a distributed network with no shared state.
Project
One-time Drop ↗Send a file with a link that works exactly once. Zero-trust by design: the server never sees what you sent.
Project
Tinyboard →E-ink gadgets for family and friends: ESP32 Rust firmware, a captive-portal config UI, and a 3D-printed case that is just code.
Project
Tinykeys →A nine-key RGB macro pad: hardware, wiring, firmware, and a macOS companion app.
Project
Greenline app ↗Real-time Green Line predictions and train locations on iOS. Finds your nearest station and lets friends track your train.
Project
Is it AI? →Paste writing and see which paragraphs read as AI-written, scored against a public benchmark.

Posts

A collection of posts, articles, and other miscellaneous coms.

2026-08-13★ Building Tinyboard: a Rust-based platform for e-ink gadget apps →E-paper gadgets for family and friends: ESP32 Rust firmware with no main loop, a captive-portal config UI served from flash, and a 3D-printed case that is also just code.
2023-05-01★ Own the Data, Disown the Risk ↗The Vault Proxy: a security architecture for maintaining data ownership while transferring risk.
2022-09-26★ Inside the Enclave ↗Footprint's core security architecture — foundational systems designed to restore trust through robust security.
2021-05-06★ No State, Just Gossip! Making tunnelto.dev distributed →Forget managing global state, see how tunnelto.dev runs its distributed network with a simple gossiping protocol.
2018-06-23★ Losing 100 pounds in 276 days →I lost over 100lbs in 10 months by tightly monitoring, recording, and restricting the amount of calories I ate everyday.
2026-09-07Tinykeys: LED Macro Pad →Hardware, wiring, firmware, and macOS integration for a nine-key RGB macropad.
2024-01-16Why Vaulting + Onboarding is Better Together ↗How integrating the Footprint Vault with embedded onboarding resolves challenges in handling sensitive data.
2023-03-27Inside the Enclave, Part 2 ↗Nitro Enclaves and their practical implementation in Footprint's security infrastructure.
2021-12-31Building a Decentralized Identity Verification system on Solana (Part 1) →Replacing SMS verification with decentralized identity and verification built with a Solana smart contract.
2021-07-05Help Net Security: FIDO2 Authenticators ↗Platform or roaming FIDO2 authenticators: Which one is right for your workforce?
2021-03-29Krypton is now Akamai MFA →Krypton is now an Akamai portfolio product: Akamai MFA.
2019-09-19Akamai Technologies Inc. Acquires Authentication Technology from KryptCo ↗Business Insider article about Krypt.co's technology acquisition.
2019-06-20All Things Auth Podcast ↗Krypton is built on an end-to-end encrypted pairing protocol.
2018-08-30Krypton's Zero Trust Infrastructure ↗Krypton is built on an end-to-end encrypted pairing protocol.

Contact

The best way to reach me is email — hello@alexgrinman.com.