New step in the business trajectory of Fractus, a Barcelona-based company that revolutionized the mobile phone sector worldwide by ending the era of bulky external antennas. In a reality with more and more connected devices, the technology company is immersed in a process of diversification of its activity to establish itself in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). With this objective, the spin-off of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) has just landed in the health sector, expanding its scope of action beyond mobile telephony and telecommunications towers.
The company has successfully licensed its antenna technology, based on fractal shapes, for wireless medical devices such as pacemakers, defibrillators, and resynchronization devices, the latter used to treat heart failure. "Not only mobile phones need wireless connectivity and antennas. Devices like pacemakers, which are implanted in the body, also have to communicate with the outside, either with other devices that the patient has at home or with the hospital itself, and monitor what is happening, a remote control that is done through antennas," explains the CEO and founder of Fractus, Rubén Bonet, in statements to The New Barcelona Post. According to the company, the use of its technology allows maximizing the performance of antennas applied to telemedicine in a minimal space.
The hospital system is a field that Fractus had been exploring for some time and that now becomes one of its main focuses as it becomes the third sector in which it will charge for the use of its technology. Although it started by having antenna factories in China and Korea, the company changed course in 2009, the year in which it signed its first license with Apple, a business model that accelerated from 2014. After taking mobile phone companies that did not want to pay it to court, Fractus added brands such as Samsung, Motorola, LG, HTC, BlackBerry, Sharp, or ZTE to its portfolio, as well as teleoperators such as ATT, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon. Since then, the company has registered accumulated revenue of 200 million euros.
Currently, the company holds an intellectual property rights portfolio of more than 40 inventions protected through more than 120 patents in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Similarly, litigation continues against companies that fraudulently use its internal antennas. In this regard, Fractus has recently sued ADT and Vivint, two alarm companies based in the United States, for infringement of its patents.
The company based in Sant Cugat del Vallès expects its antennas for medical devices to eventually have a similar weight in its accounts to that of the other two sectors from which it collects royalties. "It's an immense market, with revenues of three trillion dollars worldwide. It will be an important leg for the company," explains Bonet. In the last five fiscal years, Fractus' average annual turnover has been 17.6 million euros. Founded in 1999, the workforce exceeds 50 employees.