Jim Fruchterman

Biography

Jim Fruchterman, CEO, Tech Matters
Technologist for Good and Social Entrepreneur

Jim Fruchterman is a leading social entrepreneur, a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and a Distinguished Alumnus of Caltech. His life’s work is applying technology to benefit the 95% of humanity typically neglected by for-profit tech companies.

Jim’s career started with a private enterprise rocket company. Although the rocket blew up on the launch pad, this experience launched his entrepreneurial career in Silicon Valley, where he started two successful for-profit companies in the machine learning/artificial intelligence field in the 1980s.

Jim’s first social enterprise idea was a machine that recognizes letters and words and reads those words aloud to people who are blind. He founded Benetech, now Silicon Valley’s leading nonprofit technology company, to build these reading machines, empowering people with disabilities to read independently. He continued by creating Bookshare, which is now the largest library in the world for people who are blind or dyslexic. Jim was on the original drafting team for the Treaty of Marrakesh, the first pro-consumer intellectual property treaty passed by the United Nations.

In 2019, Jim founded Tech Matters, a new nonprofit tech for good organization. Tech Matters builds the technology for social good movement, helping social and systems entrepreneurs use tech to achieve impact at scale. Its first two social enterprises are Aselo, a shared modern contact center for the child helpline movement, and Terraso, a platform to bring better tools and more funding to locally-led sustainability initiatives to respond to climate change.

Through his work with Tech Matters, Benetech and as a trailblazer in the field of social entrepreneurship, Jim continues today advancing his vision of a world in which the benefits of technology reach all of humanity, not just the wealthiest and most able five percent.