Inhaltsverzeichnis für Spring 2026 in Fast Company

WE AT FAST COMPANY SPEND ALL year, every year, researching and assessing companies. When it comes time to identify the Most Innovative Companies in the World, there are four key factors we consider: • Innovation. Did the company create something truly original? • Impact. Did this innovation have a measurable impact on the company and its industry? • Timeliness. Did the innovation happen in the past 12 months? Or, if it's older, did it bear fruit during this time frame? • Relevance. Does the innovation we're highlighting connect to larger issues facing industry or society? No company clears the bar unless it meets those criteria. From there, there are patterns that emerge, and discovering them is always my favorite part of the process. Sometimes they're obvious, like when ESG or…

The nice thing about being Google is that the opportunities to put AI to work are endless. Here are just some of the places it's deploying its Gemini model. Google Search The dominant search engine is going way beyond lists of links with Gemini-powered features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Gmail In January, the email service began rolling out a raft of new AI tools, including one that highlights time-sensitive messages. Google Meet Users of Google's videoconferencing platform can use “Ask Gemini” to catch up on meetings in progress and summarize action items. Google Home Google's line of gadgets is adding AI smarts, such as Nest security cams that provide daily text recaps of what they saw. Nano Banana This AI image model's dizzying array of photoediting tricks…

Some of AI's biggest moments have been accidents. ChatGPT, before it exploded, was meant only as a “sandbox” to give the AI some real-world chat experience. Similarly, Anthropic engineers originally built the popular Claude Code tool, which generates and tests code based on natural language prompts, to evaluate their models’ coding skills in late 2024. The engineers soon began using it for their own work and, after some improvements, released it as a product last spring. Claude Code isn't the quickest or cheapest AI coding tool, but it may be the smartest. It automates code review and security checks before sending code live, and developers say the tool is uniquely aware of the entire code base, so it can steer away from additions or alterations that might create bugs elsewhere.…

BEFORE NOEL AND LIAM GALLAGHER took the stage during their Oasis Live ’25 world tour last year, fans were treated to a video that looked back on the band's legendary run: There were scenes of crowd-surfing at Knebworth in 1996, the band's wild Wembley shows in 2000, and fans in the present day. Except it wasn't a documentary. It was a commercial for the Adidas Original Forever collection, an exclusive collab between the band and the German shoe giant, which sponsored the tour. It was never a hard sell. At every stop on the 41-date tour, fans were already showing up dressed in the Three Stripes, which has been a common sight at Oasis gigs ever since the Gallagher brothers made the brand their de facto uniform in the ’90s.…

USUALLY, ALL-NIGHTERS ARE FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS AND PEOPLE WORRIED ABOUT LOSING THEIR JOBS IF THEY DON'T DELIVER. And if there's one thing that Ryan Coogler—writer, director, and coproducer of Sinners—has demonstrated over his career, it's that he delivers. Yet on this February afternoon—a day before his blood-soaked Southern Gothic blockbuster would become the most Oscar-nominated project in cinema history—he's sitting across from me in a knit monochrome tracksuit and thick-rimmed glasses, looking rather sleepy. “My bad, bro,” he tells me after briefly losing his train of thought in the middle of a sentence. “I just pulled an all-nighter trying to get a draft in.” The script is for an upcoming TV reboot of the hit 1990s series The X Files, which Ryan is coproducing for Disney+ through Proximity Media, the…

A decade ago, chipmaker AMD was deep in debt and an afterthought in the PC business, with some analysts fearing bankruptcy. After revitalizing its PC business with its Ryzen chips and bringing a much-needed alternative to Intel, AMD is now injecting competition into the booming AI data center sector. The chipmaker hopes to compete with rival Nvidia by lowering costs and creating a more open ecosystem. To that end, AMD has been pivoting from being mainly a chip supplier to providing end-to-end AI architecture and systems. The key to that transformation is AMD's MI450 chip series, expected to launch later this year. Building on AMD's existing MI350 series, the MI450 offers a vast performance increase and can scale up to systems with hundreds of thousands of chips. It has already…

What does the car of the future look like? It's probably electric and made by BYD, the world's largest EV manufacturer. But that hardly narrows the possibilities. Over the past seven quarters, the Shenzhenbased automaker has invested more than $13 billion in R&D in its quest to build affordable, futuristic, and even regionally targeted EVs—most of which now come with self-driving capabilities. In China, where more than 1 million of its $10,000 Seagull EVs ply the roads, BYD debuted both the Qin L EV, an affordable take on the Tesla Model 3, and a hair-flattening supercar called the YangWang U9 Xtreme that scans the road and can jump over potholes. Elsewhere, BYD has adapted EVs to fit into local driving cultures. For Japan, it created an EV version of the…

ABRIDGE HAS CHANGED THE way thousands of doctors practice medicine. Its ambient AI scribe automatically converts patient conversations into clinical notes, insurance billing codes, and aftervisit summaries. Since the company's founding in 2018 by cardiologist Shiv Rao and its CTO Zachary Lipton, it has supported more than 80 million conversations in 250 health systems. Now, Abridge is going from being a passive tool to an active assistant. Using some of the $550 million in fresh capital that it raised in 2025, Abridge built a contextual-reasoning engine, enabling its clinical AI to pull information from multiple sources, including a patient's record, previous visits, and insurer guidelines. The engine powers a new feature that helps clinicians ensure prior authorizations for medical procedures get approved. The tool, which is being piloted with Pittsburgh's…

A growing chorus of experts believe that large language models alone will not lead to the industry's holy grail: AI that is generally smarter than humans. Today's AI systems, which are designed to develop a model of words and their meanings, need to move beyond language to achieve some of AI's biggest promises. They need to perceive the real world. “We firmly believe that spatial intelligence is the next frontier of artificial intelligence,” says Fei-Fei Li, the AI pioneer whose work laid the foundation for computer vision systems. Li's World Labs, which she cofounded with AI researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall two years ago, is building a form of “world model” capable of processing spatial data and developing a physicsbased understanding of three-dimensional environments. The company released…

PUERTO RICAN–BORN BENITO Antonio Martínez Ocasio, aka Bad Bunny, has long grounded his music in the island's culture. But his 2025 album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, deepened those roots profoundly. In an homage to Puerto Rico and its influential diaspora, he wove in salsa, described the sunset in San Juan, name-checked musicians and ballplayers. Produced by his longtime label, Rimas Entertainment, DTMF became Spotify's most streamed album of 2025 and took home the 2026 Grammy for Album of the Year. But Bad Bunny and Rimas didn't just pay tribute to Puerto Rico. They used the album to drive real money to the island and its residents eight years after Hurricane Maria left them in the dark. Between July and September, Bad Bunny performed a series of 31 sold-out concerts in…

DESPITE RUMORS OF ITS DEMISE, THE EMAIL INBOX remains the nexus of our digital lives, which also means it's still hackers’ favorite way in. The inbox's vulnerability to targeted phishing attacks is why, in 2017, after years of stress-testing corporate networks and waging cyberattacks for the Department of Defense, Josh Kamdjou decided to launch Sublime Security. The Washington, D.C.–based startup is built on the premise that while it's impossible for security software to catch every malicious email, it can learn at the speed of attackers. Sublime's platform, which connects with major email providers, uses a simple coding language to build an open library of threat signatures to help identify malicious emails. Its specialized detection agents, meanwhile, can rapidly learn what a bad email looks like and pick up on the…

LAST YEAR, IT TOOK A TEAM OF hackers five minutes to break into a small American defense contractor and gain access to thousands of classified blueprints of carriers and submarines. None of the hackers were human. The attack—carried out by seven-year-old startup Horizon3.ai, which developed its NodeZero platform to stress-test networks—was part of a National Security Agency–sponsored effort to better secure hundreds of businesses that play critical roles across defense systems and supply chains. “AI essentially gives the bad guys infinite cyber bullets,” says cofounder and CEO Snehal Antani. That makes it easier for them to discover and attack security flaws. Rather than hiring a costly team of human penetration testers, Horizon3.ai customers can unleash AI agents on themselves, allowing their security teams to identify and quickly fix vulnerabilities. The…

Even as China's shipbuilding dominance grows, a traditional U.S. guided-missile destroyer can take up to nine years to deliver. Saronic produces autonomous vessels—from the six-foot Spyglass to the 180-foot Marauder—that can defend these multibillion-dollar ships and protect Western interests around the globe. Cofounder and CEO Dino Mavrookas, a veteran of SEAL Team Six with seven combat deployments, is demolishing rusty approaches to boatbuilding by simplifying design and vertically integrating. Like defense tech giant Anduril, Saronic doesn't wait for contracts but builds software first and assumes the cost of the hardware up front. After raising $600 million in February 2025, it bought a shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana, where workers completed the first Marauder hull in about nine months. That means it will likely be “the fastest ship built in the United…

ONE NIGHT IN JANUARY, CHEF DAN BARBER AND HIS TEAM ARE GATHERED IN THE KITCHEN, PLATING COURSE AFTER COURSE OF VEGETABLES. VEGETABLES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN the draw at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the restaurant outside New York City that helped pioneer farm-to-table American dining in the 2000s. Tonight's menu includes habanero peppers, specially bred for their fruitlike sweetness but zero heat, then freeze-dried so they're edible, seed to stem. A leek-garlic hybrid, tender up to its dark green tips. A tray of fist-size lettuce heads, served whole, with leaves that crunch like romaine but taste like spinach; Barber hands me a pair of shears and invites me to “just snip the leaves off” and eat them, like the diners will. With a taste far superior to the bland, nutrient-depleted…

Hidden inside a sleek new induction stove—at the bottom, where a warming drawer might go—is a battery that both lowers installation costs and helps support the electric grid. Copper, the startup behind the stove, began working on it five years ago, as battery prices fell and grid constraints mounted. The batteries recharge when renewable energy is plentiful, then power the appliances when the grid is taxed. If the power goes out, it can fuel four or five additional meals. For home cooks, there's no need to pay for the expensive electrical upgrade that most induction stoves require: Installation is as simple as plugging it in. The oven preheats four times faster than a gas range, while custom software maintains labgrade temperature control for tasks like proofing bread or baking a…

TODAY, THE GRIM MANTRA THAT “print is dead” seems all but a given. The Onion begs to differ. The 38-year-old satirical news publication, wrested from the grips of private equity in 2024 by a group including Twilio cofounder Jeff Lawson and former NBC News disinfo reporter Ben Collins, has built an audience of 29.5 million. And it's the print version, not the site, that's driving business. With 65,000 paying print subscribers, in 50 states and 50 countries, The Onion is, by some estimates, the country's 12th-largest print newspaper, above The Boston Globe. Overall annual revenue grew 300% in 2025. Nostalgic Gen Xers and millennials giddily pay $99 a year. “They realize they're subsidizing very big stunts,” CEO Collins says. “They're in on the bit.” Those capers include turning a joke…

FOR TEACHERS TRYING TO work in downtown school districts, the housing math often doesn't add up. In California, ground zero for the affordability crisis, more than half of educators are rentburdened and struggle to pay for housing. San Diego's school district decided that if the costly housing market wasn't making room for teachers and other district employees, it would. In early 2026, school leadership approved plans for district officials to negotiate with local developers to create nearly 3,000 units of workforce housing on the district's unused properties. Some of the proposed apartment developments should include childcare centers, and the district is pushing for more two- and three-bedroom units for families. “Building affordable housing, and the district retaining ownership of the land to collect annual lease revenue, strengthens our schools and…

1. Ramp For giving businesses unprecedented agency in managing costs 2. Bilt For rewarding renters—and now homeowners too—with neighborhood benefits 3. Addi For bringing AI-enabled BNPL to a market still dominated by cash 4. Robinhood For leading the way on tokenization and embracing prediction markets 5. OnePay For sharing a full suite of financial tools with Walmart shoppers, including the opportunity to invest 6. First Street For putting a number on the true cost of climate change 7. Forge Global For bringing the best of public market trading to the private markets 8. Entrepreneurs First For offering European founders a chance to learn Silicon Valley's secrets 9. Aven For unlocking the power of homeowners’ wealth 10. Monarch For assisting families as they budget and plan for the future 11. CaskX…

MEDICAL DEVICES are no longer clunky pieces of equipment; many have evolved into discreet, everyday companions. That's the case with Cionic's bionic tech, which blends wearable sensors and AI-powered electrical stimulation directly into clothing to benefit patients contending with more than 20 neurological conditions, including multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, and stroke. For people with mobility impairments, the company's leg-based neural sleeve monitors movement in real time and delivers immediate stimulation as needed. It can adapt to a user's gait and muscle control, along with a variety of surfaces. Unlike traditional assistive devices, it's designed to feel seamless and intuitive, like an extension of the body rather than external hardware. In September, Cionic's Neural Sleeve 2 became the only FDA-cleared device to activate muscle movement and relax muscle spasms at the…

TEXTILES ARE THE BIGGEST SOURCE OF MICROPLASTIC pollution, shedding fibers not just in factories but in washing machines, where tiny plastic fibers break loose and flow into wastewater systems, ending up in rivers, oceans, and even the air. The U.K.-based startup Matter makes advanced filtration technology, called Regen, that captures microplastic pollution. In 2025, Bosch and Siemens launched a new washing machine filter that uses the tech. The system is self-cleaning, doesn't rely on disposable bags or cartridges, and can run for up to 20 wash cycles before it needs to be emptied, lowering both cost and hassle for consumers. Matter also makes a version of its filtration system for textile factories, another major source of microfibers. Globally, factories are estimated to emit around 173,000 metric tons of microfibers every…

AS SOLAR PANEL PRICES HAVE come down, it's become increasingly easy to power a house or a small business using the sun instead of the grid. In Latin America, that's created a boom in renewable energy companies that act as one-stop shops for solar power and energy storage. Last year, Niko Energy raised $23 million to build Mexico's first “virtual power plant,” a network of small energy-producing and storage devices pooled together to support the electric grid. The goal is for small businesses and residences to power not only themselves but their neighbors as well. The company says it has been working with officials behind the scenes to help create the necessary regulatory framework to realize such an operation. In the meantime, it's been scaling up. The company launched an…

KAYLEEN WALTERS Head of Mojang Studios and franchise development for gaming, Microsoft JARED HESS Director, A Minecraft Movie CIARA FARRIS Radio, television, and film student, Northwestern University, and casual Minecraft fan JAMES LAMAR Vice president of film, alternative content, Regal Cinemas MINECRAFT IS, PERHAPS, THE ULTIMATE SANDBOX game. Infinite space, multiple game modes, and seemingly endless updates. The game's limitless possibilities have helped it sell more than 350 million copies since it launched in 2011 (only Tetris has sold more games, and it had a 27-year lead). In 2014, Microsoft acquired Minecraft developer Mojang for $2.5 billion. That same year, Mojang Studios began trying to figure out how to turn an open-ended game into a narrative film for Warner Bros. By 2022, the adaptation coalesced around Napoleon Dynamite director Jared…

As artificial intelligence tools get increasingly agentic, Nvidia is setting the pace by designing high-powered systems that keep data centers humming. Its signature new product, the GB300 NVL72 platform, is a two-ton system that packages 72 of the company's Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs in a liquid-cooled rack, combining the parallel compute capacity of GPUs with the orchestration power of CPUs to enable the heaviest AI workloads. The platform is “the most ambitious system we've ever built,” says Dion Harris, senior director of AI infrastructure at Nvidia, which reached a $4.5 trillion market cap in 2025. Integrating innovations in networking, liquid cooling, power management, and software, the GB300 NVL72 functions as a plug-and-play, rack-scale AI supercomputer. “The engineering challenges were extraordinary,” Harris says, noting that the company…

Ramp, a financial operations platform known for its corporate card and expense management, measures success in the time and money it helps its 50,000-plus business customers save. In 2025, the company created AI agents for controllers, accountants, and other finance roles. Unlike consumer chatbots that sometimes go rogue, Ramp's agents are fully integrated into customers’ financial data and systems and are built to provide citations for their work—an essential requirement for annual audits. Ramp's agents are more than 99% accurate when it comes to tasks like determining whether a travel expense adheres to company policy—more accurate than humans working alone, according to Ramp cofounder and CEO Eric Glyman. “It wasn't incremental,” he says of the transformation his team delivered to Ramp customers. “Over a million end users filing expenses have…

It's one thing to build a product that's useful. It's another to create something indispensable. Though legal tech startup Harvey's platform is already being used by more than half of the largest 100 U.S. law firms, it spent the past year refining its AI tools into increasingly essential tech for big and boutique firms alike. That included rolling out some 250 platform improvements that streamline Harvey's ability to analyze documents, draft contracts, and do legal research. Harvey also introduced products to improve and centralize legal processes, including Workflow Builder, which allows users to develop custom systems that reflect their firms’ practices. (They built more than 18,000 in just six months.) Shared Spaces, meanwhile, streamlines communication between legal professionals and clients. “If I'm a client, the way I [currently] share data…

ALEX COOPER was driving a hot pink Jeep through the desert with former Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant and Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, of White Lotus fame. Suddenly, their cell service dropped to zero, just as Bryant was trying to send an important contract and Impacciatore was in a heated text exchange with her boyfriend, Jared. But Cooper had their backs. Thanks to the satellite service on Cooper's phone, Bryant was able to send her document and close the deal. Impacciatore, meanwhile, got through the text-dot purgatory (“DOT DOT DOT WHAT?”) to find out that Jared wanted to move in together. “Time to move on,” Impacciatore declared, upon receiving the news. “It's a little too much,” Cooper agreed. The clever and stylish ad, which debuted in October 2025,…

With its familiar name, classic Apple-esque serifed font, and shiny, gold packaging that channels Willy Wonka's golden ticket, the David protein bar wants to be both your hyper-optimized meal replacement and your candy fix—and somehow, it pulls it off. That swagger comes via L.A.-based design studio Day Job. The eightyear-old firm has mastered the art of inserting products into the zeitgeist, from Fly by Jing's viral chili crisp to Woodwork, Grindr's cheekily positioned erectile dysfunction pills (“Hard just got easy”). Day Job cofounder Rion Harmon says the agency doesn't just imagine a name or logo for its startup clients; it generates “alternate realities” for them to choose between. Each offers a unique tone, visual identity, and path for a company to grow into. “We look for five or 10 ways…

WHEN CYER A COFOUNDER YOTAM Segev talks to chief information officers under pressure to roll out AI, he hears a frequent concern: “I don't even know what data we have, so how am I supposed to let the AI run loose?” It's a pressing issue as coding bots and agentic systems can access, generate, process, and act on vast amounts of data, introducing new risks. That's where Segev's five-year old startup comes in. To take on hackers, Cyera is doing what they would do first: figure out where a company's data is stored and shared. Cyera's AI-native system uses APIs to noninvasively connect to a company's data assets and then map, classify, and track all of its structured and unstructured data. Segev—who, along with cofounder Tamar Bar-Ilan, built the IDF's…

Salt Lake City's newest skyscraper is also a sky cleaner. Astra Tower, a 451-foot luxury residential building that opened in 2025, was designed by HKS Architects to reckon with one of Salt Lake City's biggest challenges: poor air quality. Because it sits in a valley ringed by mountains, the city suffers the choking effects of what's known as an inversion layer. Cold air forms a kind of cap at the ridge of the mountaintops, trapping polluted urban air in the city—pushing the air quality to unhealthy levels. “You can see it. You can smell it,” says HKS partner and Salt Lake City resident Emir Tursic. Astra Tower's developer called on the architects to come up with a solution that helped not just the tower's residents but the city itself. The…

Kidney disease is common; donor kidneys are not. Every year, less than a third of the roughly 90,000 Americans on the kidney transplant list receive one. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup eGenesis is exploring an alternative source: pigs. Tissue from pigs, which have biological similarities to humans and similarly sized organs, is already used in heart valves, surgical mesh, and wound-healing products. But whole-organ transplants tend to be rejected by the human immune system. eGenesis, cofounded by Harvard geneticist George Church, uses CRISPR geneediting technology to engineer pigs with organs more compatible with humans by eliminating porcine genes that can trigger organ rejection and inserting human ones. In 2025, eGenesis successfully transplanted two of its genetically modified pig kidneys into volunteers with end-stage kidney disease. One recipient went 271 days before his…

DOMESTIC BOX-OFFICE REVENUE may have flatlined, but IMAX ticket sales are booming. The company notched a record $449 million in domestic receipts last year and $1.28 billion global box office, up 40% year over year. IMAX's 450 screens in North America consistently outearn regular ones. Despite accounting for roughly 1% of all movie screens on the continent, IMAX pulled in nearly 20% of the first-weekend box-office gross for several blockbusters, including Ryan Coogler's Sinners (see page 22), F1: The Movie, and Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. Yes, some of that stems from the higher ticket price. “When people leave their homes, they want something special,” IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond says. “It's a small premium to get something really transporting.” IMAX's growth hasn't come just from Hollywood. With nearly 1,400 screens overseas,…

After federal budget cuts hit charitable aid last spring—eliminating 200,000 volunteer roles for AmeriCorps alone and threatening an aid shortfall of $370 million— Golden, an 11-year-old volunteer management platform, acted fast. It donated $500 million in software license grants to sustain up to a million non-profits, allowing them to protect their critical services. Golden uses AI to facilitate civic engagement. For volunteers—2 million of whom registered with Golden's platform in 2025—it finds personalized opportunities in seconds. Meanwhile, roughly 50,000 organizations, from local and state agencies to AARP and UNICEF, use it to manage resources and measure impact in real time. “2025 was a year where needs were laid bare,” founder and CEO Sam Fankuchen says. Golden's software license donations allowed some organizations to distribute food and healthcare the same day…

PRODUCERS AT CNBC WAKE UP IN the morning and look at the public markets in order to plan the day's lineup. John Coogan and Jordi Hays, cohosts of TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network)—a daily talk show devoted to the business of technology—wake up and look at what's trending on X. And then, they gab. “We cover something like 50 to 100 [topics], rapidfire,” says Hays. Five days a week, in bespoke suits, the duo riff on the news for three uninterrupted hours, accompanied by a revolving cast of venture investors, startup founders, and the occasional single-name elite, like “Zuck.” On good days, the livestream (available on X, YouTube, and TBPN.com) draws more than 130,000 simultaneous viewers; millions more watch the highlighted clips and listen to the podcast. “We basically leverage…

A DOCTOR'S HELPER How Traumagel works compared to conventional stanching methods 1 __ A combination of fungi- and algae-based polysaccharides, Traumagel works by being “flowable” enough to reach the source of a bleed but strong enough to prevent blood from washing it away. “Once the gel flows into the wound, you create a mechanical barrier against bleeding,” says Landolina, who became a nationally certified EMT in 2025. He notes that Traumagel stops bleeding regardless of a patient's ability to clot. 2 __ For traumatic injuries, first responders will often pack wounds with gauze to try to stop severe bleeding. Wound packing is painful for patients and potentially dangerous for first responders. Besides the challenge of reaching the source of bleeding, the person packing the gauze can be injured if bullet…

1. Dell Technologies For addressing storage bottlenecks from increasing AI demand 2. ABM Industries For integrating smart tech into commercial spaces 3. Smartling For transforming translation technology with AI 4. Ironclad For creating an AI legal assistant that works throughout the contract life cycle 5. QuickFi For giving small businesses a more efficient way to finance expensive equipment 6. Schneider Electric For helping suppliers reduce their carbon footprint 7. Zenoti For powering the salon industry with state-of-the-art AI tools 8. HubSpot For providing small businesses an affordable, easy-to-use, state-of-the-art CRM platform 9. Pattern For offering brands a free tool that provides insights into AI-driven commerce 10. Epique Realty For arming its agents with powerful AI tools…

1. Merit America For creating an online college for working adults and to upskill workers 2. Liner For allowing academics and researchers across the world to bolster their work with accurate, peerreviewed sources 3. Ellucian For helping students match their education and skills with the most soughtafter jobs 4. Kaplan For easing the stress of the college admissions process for parents—and their kids 5. Patient Ready For training the next generation of healthcare workers through AI-powered virtual interactions with patients 6. Pangram For making an AI-detection system that actually detects AI 7. Lingokids For enabling parents to make in-flight screen time a little more educational 8. TrustCircle For using AI to bring mental health support into the classroom 9. MagicSchool AI For giving teachers their time back by simplifying admin…

IF SPICES TELL THE STORY OF GLOBAL TRADE, FEW BRANDS had a closer view of it in 2025 than American spice importer Burlap & Barrel. Founded as a social enterprise by the politicalactivist duo behind Guerrilla Ice Cream (one a former chef with a master's in violence, conflict, and development), the company leveraged its founders’ international development contacts to build direct farmer relationships, eliminating middlemen to pay suppliers up to 10 times more. After the Trump administration announced “Liberation Day,” his broad (and erratic) package of import duties, the founders adapted by collaborations with Martha Stewart, Jane Goodball, Bon Appétit, and Youmaking blends that combined higher-tariffed goods like Vietnamese cinnamon with lower-tariffed spices—Guatemalan allspice, Grenadian nutmeg— for offerings like a toasted pepita pumpkin spice that sold out immediately. The brand's…

1. Gilead Sciences For bringing the end of HIV/AIDS within reach 2. Vertex Pharmaceuticals For finding a new method for managing pain without opioids 3. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals For tackling rare diseases using RNA interference 4. Neurotech Pharmaceuticals For battling vision loss with a cell-therapy implant 5. On Target Laboratories For illuminating tumors during surgery 6. Sanofi For massively growing vaccine and biologics development 7. Kedrion Biopharma For scaling treatment for chronic immune system disorders 8. Boehringer Ingelheim For creating a tablet that helps people with a rare lung disease breathe easier 9. Nuvation Bio For pioneering a cancer treatment that overcomes resistance mutations 10. Bayer For broadening the approach to treating menopause symptoms without hormones…

SUNDAR PICHAI WAS BLINDSIDED BY CHATGPT. SOON AFTER BEING NAMED Google CEO in 2015, he'd declared that the world was entering an AIfirst era. He went on to bet his stewardship of the entire company on his belief that the technology would be “an intelligent assistant helping you throughout your day,” as he put it in his first shareholder letter. Yet his prescience hadn't prevented OpenAI from swooping in on November 30, 2022, with the first product that truly demonstrated the epochshifting power of generative AI, a breakthrough that had emerged from Google's research labs in the first place. Pichai remembers his instinctive response to ChatGPT: “Wow, this technology is going to diffuse earlier and faster than we were expecting.” The feeling, he says, was “uncomfortably exciting.” He knew that…

Shopify is preparing for the moment when consumers no longer search for products or services online. Instead, they'll tell a chatbot what they're trying to do—plan a ski trip, outfit a nursery—and let the AI take it from there. “These AI assistants are not just going to talk to you,” Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told a small group of reporters in January. “They're going to do stuff for you. Part of this is clearly purchasing products.” To build the infrastructure for this brave new world of agentic commerce, Shopify spent the past year developing Catalog, a database of products organized by feature (price, color palette, availability, etc.) that large language models are able to parse. Crucially, Shopify has opened Catalog not just to its own merchants—millions of stores across 175…

SINCE BEGINNING HIS SECOND term as president, Donald Trump has conducted an assault on higher education, from inundating universities with civil rights investigations to eliminating billions of dollars in research grants. But some colleges and universities are finding support—and funds—to do things their way thanks to billionaire MacKenzie Scott. In 2019, the year she and Jeff Bezos divorced, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, a campaign encouraging billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth to the world's most pressing causes. Since 2020, she's given more than a billion dollars to colleges and universities, including donations prioritizing underserved students. Scott's Yield Giving awarded $7.16 billion in grants last year—nearly 260% more than it awarded in 2024. That included $700 million to at least 15 historically Black colleges and universities, $214 million…

As tariffs rattled retailers last year, Walmart refused to reflexively pass higher costs to customers. Instead, the $681 billion company absorbed them where it could, particularly with food and everyday essentials— the categories that define its role as America's largest grocer, commanding a fifth of the U.S. market. As a result, Walmart's prices crept up only 5.3%, while Amazon's have risen 12.8%. “It's in our DNA, keeping prices low,” says Dan Bartlett, Walmart's executive vice president of corporate affairs. Behind the scenes, that restraint required agility. Walmart's merchandising team, led by head merchant Latriece Watkins— who was promoted to CEO of subsidiary Sam's Club in January—delayed shipments and reworked sourcing to avoid tariff exposure when goods hit U.S. ports. It helped that more than two-thirds of the products sold in…

LAST FALL, CHIVES TOOK OVER REDDIT. IT STARTED WHEN A COOK WHO BELONGED TO THE MASSIVE SOCIAL SITE'S R/KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNITY PLEDGED TO PRACTICE his chive-cutting skills every day and post photos so that others could rate his technique. Thousands among the group's 1.8 million weekly visitors weighed in, and soon he became known as “Chivelord.” All went well until day 31, when a commenter claimed that the latest image he'd posted was the same as the one from day 23, only flipped. A scandal—known, inevitably, as Chivegate—boiled over. Chivelord confessed to the subterfuge, explaining that car troubles had prevented him from cutting chives that day. He was widely forgiven and resumed posting photos. Eventually, his redemption was cemented by an ad that Kraft's Philadelphia brand ran on Reddit. “Some…

IT'S ONE OF THE TRICKIEST QUESTIONS FOR ANY LEADER, ESPECIALLY IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE: WHEN TO FOLLOW THE HERD AND WHEN TO GO IT ALONE. Since taking the reins as CEO of Tubi in September 2023, Anjali Sud has been finding a unique path for the Fox-owned streamer. The biggest streaming services in the world— Disney+, Netflix, Prime—battle for premium content and subscription dollars. Tubi, meanwhile, has gone all in on free, with its on-demand streaming app and library of more than 300,000 movies and shows. Tubi was the first streamer to add a TikTok FYP-style video scroll to its mobile interface to help users discover new shows by replicating the UX of the social media app that competes for their attention. (Netflix has since launched its own version.)…

When Brian Niccol took the helm as Starbucks CEO in 2024, he promised that the floundering company would be going “back to Starbucks.” In a world defined by automation, he wanted to return the coffee giant to its café-culture roots. But he urged patience. And then, for five straight quarters, Starbucks stagnated. Until suddenly, it didn't. Last quarter, Starbucks's same-store sales were up 4% in North America, with overall transactions growing 3%. The company reported that members of its vaunted loyalty program were buying more, and casual customers were also returning. This nascent success is the result of one of the most aggressive retail redesigns in business history. Under Niccol, Starbucks is refreshing more than a thousand stores, replacing cold, easy-to-clean surfaces with wood finishes, plants, and plenty of color.…

As AI has risen, media companies have been sinking. Chatbots have eroded the direct web traffic publishers used to get from Google search. But Cloudflare has a new way to force AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic to pay for original reporting instead of stripmining it for free. Cloudflare undergirds much of the internet. It speeds up websites by routing data through edge networks-serving 80% of the top AI companies—and protects 20% of all websites from attacks. That means it's also able to block AI intrusions. In September 2024, Cloudflare launched AI Audit, letting websites block bots dispatched by AI companies to crawl the web and gobble content to feed LLMs. Less than a year later, Cloudflare took the trailblazing step of blocking crawlers by default, and it is now…

Japanese video game stalwart Nintendo started 2025 with the oldest console among industry power players. But by summer, it had both the freshest device on the market and a bona fide hit on its hands with the release of its Switch 2. The device sold 4.4 million units in the U.S. by year's end, according to market research firm Circana, becoming the fastest-selling video game hardware platform in 30 years. A custom Nvidia chip and processor support better graphics on Switch 2’s larger 1080p LCD display, and up to 4K output when hooked up to a TV. The console's controllers are also sleeker and more smoothly detachable. “Core Nintendo fans had been begging for a more powerful Switch for years,” says Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis for game data…

IT'S NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BE A HACKER. A STAGGERING NUMBER OF ORGANIZATIONS ARE such easy digital targets that the costs of all the scams, malware, ransomware, and nation-state attacks could top $10 trillion worldwide in 2026—and then there's incalculable political and reputational fallout that comes from high-profile hacks. Now throw generative AI into the mix. As AI amplifies the speed and volume of attacks, it lowers the barrier to entry for even amateur hackers. And with more of our data being processed by AI tools in ways that are hard to see, the vulnerabilities are multiplying. One answer is… more AI. Cyber giants and startups are using LLMs to block attacks, patch flaws, track compliance, and triage a flood of alerts. These faster, cheaper defenses are badly…

OPEN-SOURCE CODE IS THE BACKBONE OF THE DIGital supply chain—the databases and cloud platforms running everything from websites and chatbots to airplanes and hospitals. Though the code itself, maintained in public mostly by volunteers and hobbyists, is considered highly secure, it can be packaged in ways that create easy targets for bad actors. Dan Lorenc, cofounder and CEO of four-year-old Chainguard, says installing an open-source package straight off the internet is akin to “picking up a thumb drive on the sidewalk, bringing it in, and plugging it into a production server.” Chainguard aims to build transparency into the digital supply chain by being a trusted provider of opensource software. With a catalog of more than 2,000 container images—the minimal, portable sets of files that contain an application's code, libraries, and…

WHEN MARK BREITBARD WAS named president and CEO of the Gap brand in 2020, “the business was broken,” he says. He and his team set to work closing unprofitable stores, streamlining inventory, and reinvesting in quality. The fix wasn't flashy, but it paved the way for what came next: putting Gap back into the cultural conversation. That work was led by CMO Fabiola Torres, whom Breitbard brought on in May 2024, and who has made a career of spotting emerging talent. After seeing the girl group Katseye on the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy, she signed them on and worked with creative agency Invisible Dynamics to choreograph a dance tailormade for TikTok. Set to Kelis's 2003 hit “Milkshake,” the resulting video racked up 8 billion social media impressions within two…

BLOCKBUSTER celebrity beauty brands aren't novelties. Kylie Jenner translated social reach into a billion-dollar valuation. Rihanna redefined industry standards with Fenty Beauty. Selena Gomez grew Rare Beauty into a juggernaut via messages of vulnerability and self-acceptance. But with Rhode, and its products that are geared toward making skin look lacquered, plump, and healthy, Hailey Bieber has achieved a new level of success: Last year, the brand was acquired by E.l.f. Beauty for a whopping $1 billion. Rhode debuted in 2022 with just three products—a peptide lip treatment, a barrier cream, and a glazing fluid—all designed around the “glazed donut” look Bieber had popularized, and coined, on social media. It emphasized minimalism: ingredients safe for sensitive skin, nominal fragrance, and understated packaging that stood out in a sea of pastel femininity.…

There's a surprising new combatant in the coffee wars. Over the last 18 months, Oklahomabased gas station convenience chain QuikTrip has reinvented its caffeinated offerings. “Better and better coffee was becoming widely available and more convenient. It was time to level up our game,” says Ryan Boone, QuikTrip's corporate chef. (Yes, that role exists at a gas station chain.) The new arrangement features 12 self-serve taps that dispense coffee-house-worthy drinks, including cold brew, hot chocolate, and, somehow, hot and cold flavored lattes. (All brewed coffee is made from beans ground on premises and sourced from major coffee-growing regions in Central America with “the right balance of zippy and broody,” Boone says.) The self-serve coffee taps, which have been rolled out across QuikTrip's 1,200 locations in 21 states, are the first…

Office workers have a variety of software—from Figma to Microsoft Office—that centralizes and stores work while making it shareable among teams. “The same couldn't be said for musicians,” says José Chayet, cofounder of Untitled, an app for inprogress music. Launched in 2023 by Chayet and childhood friend Dan Lilienthal, Untitled— stylized as [untitled]—aims to streamline the current, Frankenstein approach to music-making, which sees artists creating a workflow by piecing together up to 10 products (Notes, Voice Memo, Dropbox, etc.)— none of which is expressly made for music. Untitled unifies the storage, recording, editing, and sharing abilities of those tools into a frictionless app that artists and producers have embraced. In December, Untitled had more than 300,000 monthly users across its free and paid tiers—triple what it had a year prior—with…

AYAR LABS HAS DEVELOPED ONE OF the leading optical “I/O chiplets” for nextgeneration computing platforms. The TeraPHY optical engine essentially converts electrical signals into optical signals for transmission over fiber, enabling much higher bandwidth and energy efficiency than copper interconnects are able to provide. Ayar's technology also reduces rack power consumption. Nvidia's new GB300 NVL72 systems, for example, consume more than 140 kilowatts per rack—enough to power up to 100 average U.S. homes. In September, Ayar Labs announced a strategic collaboration with Alchip Technologies to integrate its technology into Alchip's high-performance chips. AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and Nvidia, among others, have thus far provided $370 million in funding. Nvidia Google Crusoe Amazon Web Services Ayar Labs Nebius Armada Lambda Quantinuum xLight PsiQuantum Cognichip Sandisk Positron AI Morse Micro CONSUMER AND…

TELEVISAUNIVISION'S SPANISHlanguage streaming service, ViX, has found a way to hook younger audiences, especially Gen Z consumers—producing vertical microdramas such as El Regreso de la Heredera Fugitiva (The Return of the Fugitive Heiress) shot in the style of campy telenovelas. Splitting up 60- to 90-minute stories into bite-size episodes of one to two minutes each, the shows have generated 483 million global views across social channels as well as the company's own app since they were introduced last summer. ViX's parent company partnered with JCPenney on a five-episode holiday microdrama that was shoppable via QR codes. Unlike many of its Englishlanguage competitors, the ViX streaming service launched in 2022 with a diversified business model that includes ad-supported tiers as well as an ad-free premium service. By June 2025, global paid…

ARC RAIDERS, FROM 350-PERSON Swedish developer Embark Studios, isn't the first extraction shooter game (where players must scavenge a map to extract supplies and weapons), but it's quickly become one of the most popular. The complex environment—players explore while trying not to lose their loot at the hands of robotic AI enemies or other players— brings layers of unpredictability to the gameplay. Embark also baked an unusual social element into the game: the ability for solo players to chat with other nearby gamers, often leading to cooperation instead of competition. “That's a refreshing moment for a lot of gamers,” says Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at game data company Alinea Analytics, “because there's so much toxicity in games.” Arc Raiders has sold more than 14 million copies since its…

FOCAL WAS BORN IN THE SAN FRANcisco Bay Area, famous for its “temperate” (read: chilly) climate and summer fog that's not always conducive to dining outside. Focal's outdoor system uses overhead aluminum heaters for seat-specific heating that detects diner presence to warm people, not empty places. The adjustable heaters slide into position above diners, who can use their phone and Focal's website to adjust their heat to just the right level. The electric system plugs into a typical wall outlet and uses up to 80% less energy (and takes up less space) than other heaters, while helping restaurants avoid the carbon dioxide by-products of propane and natural gas. Focal's restaurant clients, which include Tyler Florence's Wayfare Tavern and California mini-chain Pacific Catch, have added extra outdoor seats and even extended…

COULD A BASIC LAMPPOST SOLVE THE massive challenge of urban EV charging? In September, Voltpost launched its Level 2 charger, the Voltpost Air. Unlike Voltpost's original model (affixed to the base of a lamppost), the Voltpost Air is mounted 10 feet above the ground and uses a retractable cable that runs through the post's existing conduit. The Voltpost Air accommodates two chargers on a single post, each delivering up to 9.6 kilowatts for reliable overnight charging. In January 2025, the company secured $2.6 million in grants from the U.S. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, and it has expanded to Illinois, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Converting even a fraction of the more than 25 million street lamps across the U.S. could create hundreds of thousands of chargers without expensive…

1. Databricks For supplying organizations with AI agents, minus the hassle 2. Harvey For equipping lawyers with the legal tools of the future 3. Vaulted Deep For helping major corporations take the carbon-removal fight underground 4. Arteris For fast-tracking and democratizing chip design 5. Warp For dynamically figuring out the best routes for shipping goods 6. JSX For adding regional turboprops to its all-business-class fleet 7. Digital Domain For seamlessly translating nuanced facial performances of actors into VFX 8. Flagship Pioneering For leveraging AI to reinvent the scientific discovery process 9. Bobbie For breaking the baby formula oligopoly 10. North Carolina Biotechnology Center For spurring life sciences development in North Carolina 11. Harbinger For making hybrid-electric recreational vehicles more than a pipe dream 12. The Nanostructured Materials Lab at Texas…