Nico Hoeler was invited to Podcast Cold Chain Insights

Recently, our CEO Nico Hoeler was invited to Cold Chain Insights, a podcast focused on temperature-controlled logistics for the pharmaceutical industry, by Thomas Hunt.

Over all, the episode was about our Tec4med journey and the future of cold chain monitoring. We shared how Tec4med was founded, the challenges we faced along the way, and why joining Cryoport was the right next step for our business. The conversation also explores today’s pharmaceutical shipment landscape, our key differentiators, the value of true end-to-end monitoring, and how digital solutions help overcome critical cold chain challenges.

Read through the full conversation below.

Thomas: Could you tell us about the last few years and the roles you’ve held?

Nico: Before founding Tec4med, I had very little industry experience. I started the company straight out of university, so it was my first professional role. Following Cryoport’s acquisition of Tec4med, I took on an additional role as Vice President of Digital Operations. Today, I serve as CEO of Tec4med while also supporting Cryoport’s digital strategy.

Thomas: You co-founded Tec4med while you were still a student, which is remarkable. What problem did you identify, and what convinced you there was a better solution?

Nico: Tec4med started with a very specific challenge. One of our co-founders worked as a stem cell courier and transported samples and stem cells by hand on commercial flights. At the time, shipments relied on passive packaging with a USB data logger inside. There was no integrated transport solution, and handling was complex. Runtime limitations could not be extended, and data retrieval was entirely manual. We asked ourselves why there wasn’t a smarter, fully integrated solution. That led to the development of our first product, the Nelumbox, an actively cooled shipping container powered by lithium-ion batteries, with integrated monitoring and a connected software platform. Hardware, monitoring, and software were combined into a single product. Although we later discontinued the Nelumbox, the idea of an integrated solution remains part of Tec4med’s DNA today.

Thomas: What was the structure of the company at that point? You came from a mechanical engineering background rather than pharmaceutical logistics. How did you break into the pharma industry without having direct sort of access there?

Nico: We were three co-founders, all engineers. However, from the beginning, our philosophy was to build products for end users rather than for other engineers. I often compare our thinking to Apple’s ecosystem. The Apple Watch, iPhone, App Store, and software work seamlessly together. We wanted to create that same level of integration in life sciences logistics: a shipper with built-in sensors connected to a validated software platform, all delivered from a single source. That integrated approach has guided us ever since.

Thomas: What were the biggest challenges in those early years?

Nico: In pharmaceuticals, the traditional lean startup model doesn’t work very well. You can’t develop an MVP and immediately launch it into the market. Pharmaceutical companies require validation, testing, and compliance before adopting new solutions. You may secure pilots and evaluations, but generating revenue from products in the field takes much longer. Overcoming those long adoption cycles was one of our biggest challenges.

Thomas: You started with an active cooling container that integrated monitoring technology. Today, the industry is moving toward product-centric monitoring and even sensorless approaches. How did that evolution happen?

Nico: What we realized early on was that nobody really wanted to track the container itself. Customers wanted visibility into the stem cells, tissue samples, or products inside the shipment. That insight led us to separate the software, sensors, and cooling hardware and build a flexible ecosystem. Today we support everything from small shippers to pallet shippers, ULDs, reefer containers, warehouses, refrigerators, and freezers. The focus is always on product monitoring across the entire lifecycle, from pre-manufacturing through delivery. When I talk about a sensorless approach, I mean that sensors generate the data in the background, but the product itself becomes the primary unit of tracking.

Thomas: And was it the customer that’s driven that decision for you or was that you looking at it and thinking there’s a better way of doing this and it’s more of an education piece to the customer? Where’s the push come from this?

Nico: I think it came from both. Once we realized that advantage, we are now actively pushing that into the market. And there is this old mindset where everything is still very data logger focused and you have a serial number, and then you plug it in and then you get the data. But that’s not how we see the industry. We come from the product side and try to have an integrated solution that basically does an 180 turn in how we monitor the supply chain.

Thomas: Who else is actually following this path or who else is on the same journey as you?

Nico: It’s our company philosophy. And we have a couple of leading clients that are with us here, joining the journey. And within Cryoport, we follow kind of a similar approach because we also have very integrated solutions from stationary to shipment and in-transit monitoring, where we can really follow through the product. There’s still a lot of integrations to be done and finalized to get to that final goal, but we are definitely on that path and want to push through till we get there.

Thomas: Cryoport acquired Tec4med in November 2023. What made them the right partner?

Nico: Cryoport is a best-in-class provider in our industry. They are a leading player in cell and gene therapy logistics, handling some of the most valuable and sensitive pharmaceutical products in the world. The company has long been an innovation leader, particularly in real-time end-to-end shipment monitoring. Their vision aligned closely with ours, especially regarding quality, integration, and supply chain visibility. The acquisition also provided access to complementary businesses such as MVE and Cryogene. Together, these capabilities significantly expanded our reach and accelerated our ability to serve global markets. I actually prefer the word acceleration rather than exit. We didn’t sell the company as much as we elevated it to the next stage of growth.

Thomas: How does that change the scale and complexity of what you’re building? And how has the business changed in the last three years under this switch?

Nico: We are supporting over 700+ clinical trials and a dozen of commercial clients, and we almost have one million shipments and a lot of expertise coming from there. And, what really changed is that we are now a company that can operate globally and at scale. And with extended services. We can now provide a 365 24/7 customer service, have inventory and stock all around the globe available for delivery quickly and our control tower service, legal department, and financial stability. And when we were just Tec4med on our own, it was really hard to provide that level of service.

Thomas: What does a typical pharmaceutical shipment look like today, and where do things still go wrong?

Nico: The biggest issue is fragmented visibility. Data often exists in separate systems: warehouse management systems, transportation systems, PDF reports generated by data loggers and many others. Organizations spend significant effort manually connecting those information sources. In fact, 30 – 40% of pharmaceutical supply chain data still isn’t fully digitized. Our goal is to move beyond that and create a near fully digital process. Ultimately, product release decisions should be based on data that is automatically available and immediately actionable. Another challenge arises once real-time visibility exists. Supply chain teams are often overwhelmed by alerts and deviations. We call this excursion fatigue. That’s where intelligent analytics become critical. The next stage isn’t just generating data, it’s automating decisions.

Thomas: And obviously there are a lot of monitoring vendors out there. What differentiates Tec4med from other monitoring vendors?

Nico: To achieve a product-centric approach, you need more than shipment monitoring. You need stationary monitoring and in-transit monitoring feeding into a single platform. We monitor warehouses, cold rooms, fridges, freezers, liquid nitrogen tanks, and transportation assets. We collect data on temperature, humidity, shock, tilt, light exposure, access events, and geolocation. All of this flows into a common data foundation. From there, customers can enrich the information with data from logistics providers, weather systems, and other sources before running advanced analytics across the entire supply chain.

Thomas: Can you walk me through what end-to-end really means here, and how far back and how far forward you can really see?

Nico: It depends on how it is deployed. But our goal is to go from pre-manufacturing to post-manufacturing, basically up and downstream until the patient. So really from the moment the material is received throughout the manufacturing into storage and then transit and wherever it is and might be delivered until the end user. And that across all temperature ranges. It requires different hardware and software to get there. But really that is the mission we’re working on.

Thomas: And how far away are you from that?

Nico: We can offer that service, and I guess we are there. But now the more exciting part comes along, like how can we further make it more automated, smarter and throw in some more analytics capabilities to really get more out of the data?

Thomas: Once you’ve got this clean, unified data across the whole journey, what does one platform unlock and what can you do now that you simply probably couldn’t do before?

Nico: Data quality is the foundation. Once that is established, the real opportunity lies in productivity and automation. You can automatically evaluate temperature exposure, calculate time out of refrigeration, compare conditions against product stability data, and determine whether deviations actually matter. Eventually, this supports automated release decisions and supply chain optimization. The next step is capacity planning. By combining inventory information, FEFO principles (First Expired, First Out), and real-time product visibility, organizations can optimize not just product quantities but overall supply chain performance.

Thomas: You’ve described Tec4med as the “Apple of pharma logistics.” Why continue developing your own hardware?

Nico: If you want a truly integrated solution, you need control over the entire technology stack, from sensors and firmware to cloud infrastructure and services. We operate our own calibration laboratories and maintain control over product quality and availability. That level of ownership allows us to deliver a seamless user experience and maintain independence. Most importantly, it gives us a central data foundation for analytics.

Thomas: And I know that you try to push information onto the device itself. What does that look like in reality? And you mentioned EINK displays. Can you describe what that is?

Nico: Our systems have always been integrated with different hardware properties, like for example an EINK display where you can now take the analytics piece of your software and push down information to the end user. If a product is tied to a smart device like we provided, you can basically mirror a batch number or the live temperature down to the device. So now we get this basically nice coexistence and interaction with the cloud and basically the users that operate with the system. And that really is the ecosystem that we want to build so that software and hardware are not totally independent, and the control tower is separate from the operations, but they now can really interact.

Thomas: I want to get on to one of the tough challenges obviously in this area. Integration is obviously an objection in Quality and IT teams. That’s often a hurdle they’re not willing to jump over too easily. How do you deal with those sort of objections?

Nico: You cannot run on a separate system. It needs to be well integrated and your infrastructure needs to allow that. You must have interfaces that can interfere or interact with other software solutions. And the customer needs to own the data. And we support that. First, we have the API infrastructure built to connect to various different systems, whether it’s ERP systems like SAP or Oracle or whether it’s EQMS systems like Veeva or Trackwise. We can really connect to those and enrich the data sets. But second, we are also a hardware agnostic platform, so it’s not exclusive to Tec4med hardware. We also connect third party devices. And of course, from that perspective, it’s easier to transition into our set of solutions because you can basically bring your own existing devices and over time decide what hardware to integrate and whatnot.

Thomas: Right, okay. And when you were at Tec4med, was there objection around that? And has that changed how you got over to Cryoport?

Nico: When Covid hit, there was a high demand for data loggers. Because we were still in the startup or ramp up phase, we didn’t have the financial power to have that level of hardware in stock. And we couldn’t deliver fast enough. And now we are with Cryoport in the game, we can basically offer what we couldn’t back in the day. Now we have the infrastructure, we have the global market access and the support infrastructure and financial stability to get there. And this has tremendously changed our mode in the industry.

Thomas: Was that a manufacturing issue or was that a stocking issue? Where was the pain point in that?

Nico: The problem was really getting a sensor and product on hand fast enough to cover the demand. Because if you want to manufacture data loggers in high volumes, the supply chain really becomes an issue. And back in the day, it wasn’t only us asking for sensors, it was the automotive industry and everybody else that was also pushing on the market to save their supply chains. And yeah, we just couldn’t get products on hand fast enough.

Thomas: You’ve moved from startup founder and CEO to a VP role within a Nasdaq-listed company. What have you learned? What sort of advice would you give to people taking that same journey?

Nico: I would still consider myself as an entrepreneur. And luckily and I mean, that was part of the reason why we came together with Cryoport. Cryoport is still very entrepreneurial too, so they still have that founder led vision. And my co-founder and I are still with Tec4med now. And so is basically Jerrell Shelton, the Cryoport Inc. CEO who has basically built Cryoport as we know it. Two decades ago, he didn’t found the company but he founded it as it is today, and the same applies to most of the management teams. So, we really feel like it’s still an entrepreneurial led company with a high pace and a high commitment to our vision and mission. And what I had to learn for myself is when you are a founder, you have 100 tasks that you deal with on your own, but now we must scale through people, and I cannot manage every other process because I will be a bottleneck. And I’m clearly not an expert in all of these fields.

Thomas: And so, if you look ahead in sort of three to five years, and everything you described becomes reality, what does cold chain monitoring look like? Where would you like it to be at that time?

Nico: What I hope for is that manual reports become an artifact so that we have release evidence and everything digitally available in the cloud. It’s generated and archived upon arrival, and it’s all automated from top to bottom. Then also that we have a very smart approach of handling excursions so that we can focus on those deviations that really matter and with that improve our supply chain. And really then we get to that end-to-end tracking of a sample of a batch of a lot. And get away from tracking only pieces of the supply chain. And if we can get there, that will be a significant improvement. And if we got all of that right, then comes the AI piece on top of it. Users could interact with systems through natural language, receive customized insights, optimize routes, and automate reporting and decision-making. Then I think we are there where I want us to be.

Thomas: What advice would you give to entrepreneurs entering pharmaceutical cold chain logistics today?

Nico: The most important lesson is to fall in love with the problem, not with your product. When we started, we loved the Nelumbox. We believed it was the best product in the world. Over time, we realized we needed to focus on the problems it didn’t solve. In pharmaceuticals, product development is slow and expensive. Fortunately, AI now allows companies to validate ideas and iterate faster before committing significant resources to development and certification. Finally, we deliberately chose to build both hardware and software. Software moves faster, but hardware creates a strong competitive moat. If the integration is done well, it can become a powerful differentiator.

Thomas: Well, brilliant to have you on. Thank you for your time.

Nico: Thank you, Thomas. Pleasure being here.