This interview is part of the Impact Interview series, featuring founders building technology for positive impact across People, Health, and Planet.
The standard model for medical device training is a specialist who flies in, delivers a demo, and flies out. It doesn’t scale, and a lot of the knowledge never arrives.
fracto is a German startup building digital learning infrastructure for MedTech. One platform connecting manufacturer, distributor and healthcare institution, so training reaches everyone downstream.
Laurin Gerdes is fracto’s Co-Founder and CEO. We spoke about the knowledge gap in medical devices and why the most useful technology often looks like plumbing.
Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role?
I’m Laurin Gerdes, Co-Founder & CEO of fracto GmbH. We build the eLearning platform that medical device manufacturers and their distribution partners use to train the people who sell, service and operate their devices. Before fracto I worked hands-on in MedTech marketing and product education, producing training content for clinical devices, and I saw the same problem everywhere: world-class hardware, but the knowledge about how to use it well rarely reaches everyone who needs it. At fracto I focus on product, our manufacturer partnerships and the content production side. We are a small, bootstrapped team from Germany, and our customers include some of the largest medical device manufacturers in the world.
How did your company come about and what was the motivation behind it?
fracto started from a gap we kept running into in the field. Medical device manufacturers invest enormously in developing safe, capable devices, and then hand the training over to a handful of clinical specialists who travel from hospital to hospital. That model does not scale. A distributor in another country onboards a new sales rep, a ward gets new staff, a device gets a software update: the knowledge has to be rebuilt from scratch every time, and in practice a lot of it simply never arrives.
We founded fracto to close that gap with structured, certified, trackable digital learning instead of ad-hoc product demos. The founding insight was that the problem is not only the manufacturer’s. It sits across three layers that never share a training system: the manufacturer, the distribution partner in each market, and the healthcare institution that actually uses the device. So we built one platform that connects all three, where a manufacturer can publish a learning path once and every partner and end user downstream gets the same quality of training, in their language, at their own pace.
Can you describe your company’s mission and values?
Our mission is simple: make sure that everyone who touches a medical device actually knows how to use it well. Better-trained people mean safer patients, and that is the impact we measure ourselves against.
Three values shape how we work. First, clinical accuracy over marketing polish. Our content is built with the manufacturer’s own specialists and reviewed by them, because in this field a nice-looking module that teaches the wrong workflow is worse than no module at all. Second, access instead of gatekeeping. Training should not depend on whether a specialist happens to be able to fly to your hospital, which is exactly the inequality that hits smaller clinics and emerging markets hardest. Third, evidence over assumption. Every learning path is certified and trackable, so a manufacturer, a distributor or a hospital can prove who was trained on what, rather than hoping the knowledge stuck.
We are also deliberately unglamorous about it. We are not trying to disrupt healthcare from the outside. We work inside the existing manufacturer and distributor structures and make them work better.
What are some of the most pressing social issues that your company is working to address through its technology?
The core issue is unequal access to clinical knowledge. Modern medical devices are extremely capable, but their benefit depends entirely on whether the person at the bedside knows how to use them. Today that knowledge is distributed by people who fly in, and that means large university hospitals in wealthy regions get trained thoroughly while smaller clinics, rural hospitals and emerging markets get a one-off demo, if that. Same device, very different patient outcomes.
A second issue is staff turnover and time pressure. Healthcare has a chronic staffing problem, and every new nurse or technician arriving on a ward is someone who has to learn the equipment from scratch, usually from a colleague who is already stretched. Training that only exists in someone’s head does not survive a shift change.
A third one is compliance that is real rather than performative. Regulated environments require proof of competence, and paper sign-off sheets do not give anyone that. Making training verifiable protects patients and protects staff.
And there is a quiet sustainability angle. Replacing a large share of flown-in, in-person product training with digital learning removes a lot of travel from the system, which is one of the more meaningful carbon footprints in device distribution.
How does your company measure the impact of its work in creating positive change?
We measure on three levels, and we try to stay honest about which of them is real impact and which is just activity.
The first is reach: how many people in how many markets have actually completed a certified learning path, and how deep the platform gets into the distribution chain. A learning path that only the manufacturer’s own staff completes has failed. The point is the partner in another country and the clinical team at the end of the chain.
The second is competence, not consumption. Because every path is certified and trackable, we can see completion and assessment results per role, per market, per device. That tells a manufacturer where knowledge is thin before it becomes a support case or a misused device, and it gives a hospital defensible proof of who is trained on what.
The third is what it replaces. Every learning path that gets delivered digitally is training that previously required a specialist to travel, or did not happen at all. On the business side that shows up as a strong return for our customers, and it is also the argument that convinces a procurement team faster than any impact statement: better-trained people, less travel, fewer avoidable incidents.
The story we care about most is harder to put in a dashboard. It is a nurse on a night shift in a smaller hospital who can look up how to do something correctly, at 3am, without waiting for someone to fly in.
In your opinion, what impact will technology have in creating a better future?
I think the biggest contribution technology can make is unglamorous: distributing knowledge and capability to the places that currently do not get them. Most of the inequality in healthcare is not about who owns the machine, it is about who knows how to use it. Technology is very good at closing that second gap, and it rarely gets credit for it because it looks like plumbing rather than innovation.
In our field the near-term shift is that training stops being an event and becomes infrastructure. AI will accelerate that: it lets us produce and localise clinical learning content far faster, and it makes knowledge retrievable in the moment someone needs it rather than six months earlier in a classroom. That is genuinely transformative for a nurse or a technician working under time pressure.
But I would push back on the idea that technology creates the better future on its own. In healthcare the constraint is trust and evidence, not capability. Anything we build has to be clinically accurate, verifiable and built with the people who actually know the device, otherwise it does harm faster than it does good. The teams that will matter over the next decade are the ones willing to do the slow, careful work inside regulated environments rather than the ones promising to disrupt them from outside.
So: optimistic, but the useful kind of technology here is the kind that makes existing healthcare systems work better for the people already in them.
What advice do you have for other companies looking to use technology for good and create a positive impact in the world?
Solve a problem someone is already paying to solve badly. The most durable impact companies I know did not invent a new need, they found an existing, expensive, poorly served process and made it work properly. In our case, manufacturers were already spending heavily on training. We did not have to convince anyone that training matters, only that there is a better way to deliver it. That is a much shorter conversation than asking a hospital to fund something new out of goodwill.
Build with the domain experts, not near them. In regulated fields, credibility is the product. Content that has not been reviewed by the people who actually know the device is worthless, no matter how good the platform is.
Be careful with impact language. If your impact only exists in your pitch deck and not in your customer’s operational reality, it will not survive procurement. Tie the good you do to something the buyer can verify, whether that is competence data, compliance evidence or cost.
And finally, stay small longer than feels comfortable. We are bootstrapped, which forced us to be useful to a real customer from very early on rather than to an investor narrative. That constraint made the product better.
One more thing: the impact you set out to have is rarely the one that lands. Watch what your users actually do with the thing you built, and be willing to follow that instead of your original story.
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Laurin’s advice: solve a problem someone is already paying to solve badly. That’s a much shorter conversation than asking a hospital to fund something new out of goodwill.
You can find out more about fracto by visiting fracto.de.
