Table of contents for Spring 2025 in Fast Company

I SPENT SOME TIME WITH ELON MUSK IN 2008. Musk was already business-famous then, having parlayed his profits as a member of the so-called PayPal mafia into SpaceX and Tesla. He was named CEO of Tesla that year, after becoming the lead investor in 2004. (I'd bet that to this day, 95 out of 100 people assume Musk founded Tesla; he did not.) He was also chairman of SolarCity, a residential solar installation startup that Tesla later acquired. I admired Musk a great deal. Here was an ambitious thinker, still in his thirties, who saw no problem as too big to solve. He had an immense ego and adored attention, but he was also focusing on the right things. I reached out to ask him to contribute an essay to…

LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL MAKers continue to pour money into realizing the lofty ambitions of their systems. But one company is already reaping the rewards. Nvidia helped kick off the AI race with market-dominating graphics processing units and, according to a Q3 2024 analysis from IDC, has reached a 93% unit market share of GPUs running AI workloads worldwide. Many analysts believe it could grow further. Nvidia's groundbreaking Blackwell processor, launched last March, is up to 2.5 times more powerful than its predecessor, the H100, and requires much less energy, says Shar Narasimhan, Nvidia's director of product for AI and data center GPUs. The largest data center operators and AI labs, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and xAI, are reportedly buying Blackwell GPUs by the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, Nvidia's…

A white van skids to a stop below Netflix's marquee billboard on Los Angeles's Sunset Boulevard. IT'S 4:38 A.M. ON THIS DECEMBER MORNING, STILL dark out. Henchmen in pink jumpsuits stream out of the van and swarm the billboard, replacing its English letters with Korean characters until it spells out a single phrase: 한국어를 배우지 않으면 벌을 받는다 (“Learn Korean or else”). This wasn't a hostile takeover but part of a sweeping collaboration between Netflix and the language-learning app Duolingo pegged to season 2 of the streamer's hit South Korean show Squid Game. After the first season, the app saw use of its Korean-language course jump 40% within two weeks. This time, Duolingo was ready. It created Squid Game vocabulary lessons, rolled out a TikTok filter that tests Korean pronunciation,…

CHINESE COMPANY DEEPSEEK delivered a one-two punch this winter when it released a pair of state-of-the-art AI models that require far less computing power and capital than those of Western companies. With a U.S. ban preventing DeepSeek from accessing the most powerful Nvidia chips, the company engineered new ways to conserve GPU horsepower. DeepSeek's researchers found a way to improve what's known as mixture-of-experts architecture that divides a large language model into segments that contain specialized knowledge. (This allows a specific segment to answer a question while the rest of the model remains idle.) The team also used “train of thought” data generated by a larger model to train a smaller model, DeepSeek-R1, to reason toward its answers. And they found a way to compress some of the mounting data…

WHEN KENDRICK LAMAR TOOK TO the field for the Super Bowl halftime show in February, it was the culmination of an extraordinary stretch for the Pulitzer Prize–winning rapper. The performance—which delivered verbal and visual bravado, Samuel L. Jackson as Uncle Sam, and a subversive commentary on American patriotism—capped a run that began last April when Lamar and Drake rekindled their decade-long rivalry. Their flurried exchange of diss tracks led to Lamar's incendiary “Not Like Us.” It shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and (to add insult to injury) broke Drake's Spotify record for most-streamed rap song in a single day. But Lamar was just getting started. Last summer, pgLang—the record label, production house, and creative agency that Lamar and business partner Dave Free cofounded in 2020—channeled the…

IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE—OR AT least negligent—to tell the story of Bluesky without first acknowledging X. After all, it was Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey who first announced the idea for a decentralized social media system back in 2019 (before the platform became X). Dorsey even came up with the name, and then funded a small team of researchers with company cash. It grew into a stand-alone entity that launched to the public in early 2024. And it was Elon Musk, who took over as CEO of X in 2022 and orchestrated its political and technical realignment—scuttling content moderation rules, transforming its blue-check verification into a pay-to-play model, and amplifying conservative voices—that drove millions of people to seek an alternative. Bluesky grew from about 3 million users at…

SURE, THERE ARE WEIGHT ROOMS, TREADMILLS, AND high-end workout studios at the more than 175 Life Time clubs across the country, but these spaces bear little resemblance to a gym. Life Time calls them “athletic country clubs,” blending a traditional fitness club with the amenities of a resort (pools, spas, cafés). The Minnesotabased company has gone even further, layering on classes and clubs for both kids and older adults. Some clubs are attached to coworking hubs where members can rent desks or offices. In 2024, Life Time became the nation's largest pickleball operator, and it developed a medical concierge service that offers everything from chiropractic sessions to hormone replacement therapy and GLP-1 prescriptions. Life Time members spend about $200 a month on average for access to its facilities—plus an average…

AI CODING ASSISTANTS ARE growing up quickly. Early code editors could auto-complete lines or sections of code, saving developers time. But a new generation, led by Anysphere's Cursor, gives the AI a broader contextual view of a project and involves it in more aspects of the process. The result is higher-quality code and a less tedious build. Cursor, which uses its own AI model as well as ones from OpenAI and Anthropic, can analyze the entire code base of a software project so that its suggestions mesh better with the adjacent code. With an understanding of the project's structure, components, logic patterns, and conventions, Cursor can create new features and functions based on plain English prompts. Its global view can also automatically update the code of all affected files across…

EA SPORTS SUSPENDED ITS best-selling College Football franchise more than a decade ago because of NCAA limits on player name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals. But recent changes to NIL rules made a revival possible. “We didn't want to return to the market with a College Football game unless we could do it with players,” says EA Sports president Cam Weber. For College Football 25, EA Sports spent years designing tools to get the players on board—and paid. Its HeadStart tool uses college-submitted student photos and machine learning to create virtual likenesses. A separate app, Compass, lets college players view the NIL offer and opt into (or out of) being featured in the game. Base deals for players pay $600, with top stars, like University of Michigan running back Donovan…

JUST DAYS BEFORE ATHLETIC BREWING'S NEWEST busy season begins—Dry January—its primary brewery, in Milford, Connecticut, is shifting into overdrive, working to fill a 30-million-can stockpile to meet the coming month's nationwide surge in demand. A majority of these six-packs will vanish from shelves within the first two weeks of 2025. The brewery—150,000 square feet crisscrossed by 45-foot-tall tanks and tubes (that look like they're out of a Super Mario game) and smelling of hops, citrus zest, and wet grain—is one of only two large dedicated non-alcoholic (NA) breweries worldwide. The other, in San Diego, also belongs to Athletic. At many craft breweries, you'll see sandal-clad guests sampling brews while scarfing down burgers. Athletic— now America's 10th-largest craft brewery—operates a bit differently. There are no public tours, and not even a…

AT THE END OF 2023, FIGMA EXperienced a blow that might have sent another company into a catastrophic spiral: Its planned $20 billion acquisition by Adobe fell apart under scrutiny from regulators. But Figma, which makes collaborative design tools for building websites, apps, and other digital products, didn't miss a beat. In January 2024, it rolled out its Dev Mode product, which lets software developers access the precise measurements and details they need to turn visual mock-ups into programming code without pestering designers for clarification. Dev Mode is now used at companies like Uber, Patagonia, and Volkswagen. Figma also brought programming concepts like dynamic variables (allowing designers to account for shifting factors, such as device sizes) into its software, helping teams rapidly turn prototypes into working products. In June, the…

FOR MORE THAN A DEcade, the fashion industry has been trying to solve the puzzle of making a business out of renting clothes. Rentals give consumers variety, extend the life of garments, and reduce fashion's terrible impact on the planet—but profits from them have been scarce. Rent the Runway has tried for 15 years to no avail (it lost $113.2 million in 2024). But six-year-old Nuuly has gotten the pieces in place with its $98 monthly subscription that gives users access to more than 400 brands. In 2024, Nuuly—owned by Urbn, parent company of Anthropologie and Urban Outfitters—hit 300,000 subscribers, up 51% year over year, and generated its first full year of operating profit. Though Nuuly rents clothes from brands like Madewell, Barbour, and Mother Denim, nearly half of its…

PORTLANDERS HAVE LONG BEEN proud of their quirky airport with its retro teal-and-purple carpeting and commitment to street pricing. But with the August opening of the $2.15 billion new main terminal, the Port of Portland has turned Oregon's Portland International Airport (PDX) into a showstopping destination for all visitors. Designed by ZGF Architects, the building embraces the region's natural environment with a mass timber roof and 72 living trees throughout the concourse. All of its shops and concessions are area brands, and 90% of the labor was done by local union workers. A soonto-be-installed groundwater heat pump, engineered by Portland-based firm PAE Engineers, will cut the heating system's use of fossil fuels by 90%. Port of Portland executive director Curtis Robinhold says the Port began working on the project seven…

WHEN 505 STATE STREET, A 44-STORY, mixed-use high-rise, opened in downtown Brooklyn last spring, passersby noticed an odd sight jutting from the second floor above Flatbush Avenue: a sculpture of an oversize three-prong plug, the none-too-subtle calling card for New York's first all-electric skyscraper, spearheaded by Alloy Development. Embracing electrification comes both from Alloy's ethos—rooted in the design and construction of its properties throughout New York City—and from timing. During the tower's design phase in 2019, the city passed Local Law 97, a bid to regulate building emissions by enforcing increasingly strict fines. Alloy decided to get ahead of what seemed like an inevitable move toward sustainable buildings by going all-electric. “Installing gas would have been like installing copper telephone lines when fiber was available,” says AJ Pires, president of…

NEARLY HALF OF ALL STARTUPS FAIL within their first five years. Loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings have a better chance of reaching the surf than founders do of celebrating their first anniversary. Israeli entrepreneurs Dori Yona and Nimrod Ram, serial founders who have navigated both successful exits and painful closings, launched SimpleClosure in 2023 to streamline the process of shuttering a business that fails, which more than half a million do each year. Leveraging fintech, legal tech, and AI, its platform automates much of the regulatory paperwork, final payroll distributions, and investor communications that traditionally take months and cost as much as $75,000 to execute—drudgery that can keep entrepreneurs from moving on. SimpleClosure, which has raised $5.5 million from investors, spent the past year developing its platform, creating a system of…

“WHAT MAKES A BOOK a bestseller?” asks Entangled Publishing founder and CEO Liz Pelletier. “You couldn't read the pages fast enough; you sat up until the wee hours to finish it. That is a bestseller that will go viral.” Amid stagnant overall U.S. book sales, one genre has gone viral: romantasy. Novels about dragons and sultry faeries—filled with steamy love affairs, high-stakes battles, and a deliberate centering of the female gaze—are expected to surpass $600 million in 2024, according to Circana. That has no small part to do with Entangled, the upstart publisher that's dominated bestseller lists with its Empyrean series, by Rebecca Yarros, along with a slew of other titles. With just two dozen staffers and led by Pelletier, a former software engineer, the #BookTok-era publisher has honed an…

1 — WAYMO 2 — NVIDIA 3 — NUBANK 4 — WNBA 5 — BYD 6 — GLEAN 7 — ABRIDGE 8 — ESSILORLUXOTTICA 9 — ROCKET LAB 10 — DUOLINGO 11 — YOUTUBE 12 — DEEPSEEK 13 — CAVA 14 — NOTION 15 — PGLANG 16 — ROBINHOOD 17 — BLUESKY 18 — ON 19 — INFINITUM 20 — ICEYE 21 — INTUIT DOME 22 — FX 23 — LIFE TIME 24 — UNSTRUCTURED 25 — BUDDERFLY 26 — ANYSPHERE 27 — SHARKNINJA 28 — SIMBE ROBOTICS 29 — EA SPORTS 30 — NUVOCARGO 31 — HUNTRESS 32 — ATHLETIC BREWING 33 — TUBI 34 — ARS PHARMA 35 — FIGMA 36 — CHAINALYSIS 37 — HISTOSONICS 38 — NUULY 39 — CRUNCHYROLL 40 — HOMECOURT 41 — PORT OF PORTLAND 42 — ZERO FOODPRINT 43 — LIQUID DEATH 44 — ALLOY DEVELOPMENT 45 — WONDER 46 — WATCH DUTY 47 — SIMPLECLOSURE 48 — FRIDA 49 — ZINC 50 — ENTANGLED PUBLISHING AS THE WORLD SHIFTS AND INDUSTRIES TRANSFORM, these companies aren't just keeping up. They're setting…

WHEN BRAZILIAN JUGGERNAUT NUBANK surpassed 100 million customers last May, it became the first digital bank outside of Asia to reach that scale and the third-largest digital bank in the world. It got there by relentlessly focusing on the practical needs of its customers, including an oft-overlooked banking demographic: teenagers. Cash is vanishing from the markets where Nubank now operates—Colombia, Mexico, and especially Brazil. But the options available to younger users haven't kept pace with money's digital shift—primarily because teen users aren't immediately profitable. But Nubank saw this as “an opportunity to start building a relationship,” says CEO David Vélez. Nubank invested in growing its Under 18 offering last year, with features that are simple by design: a debit card that parents can safely monitor and savings tools called Caixinhas,…

COMPANIES OFTEN STRUGGLE TO MINE THEIR OWN experience and institutional knowledge to stay competitive. When workers don't know where to look for information, otherwise crucial data is useless. That's where Glean steps in, with an LLM-powered assistant built by former Google engineers that allows clients' workforces to unearth and package internal information in useful ways. Think of it like ChatGPT, says CEO Arvind Jain, “but with the additional power of knowing everything about your company.” Last year, the company released Glean Work AI, which lets users enter plain language prompts to create AI agents that tackle routine and repetitive tasks. It also deployed retrieval-augmented generation, which forms custom reports from AI-selected snippets of indexed documents. Glean has proven sticky among its users, who return to the app an average of…

Moving goods within factories, warehouses, and distribution centers of ten requires a complex ballet of forklifts, plex drivers, and pallets. But even in the most graceful industrial settings, mistakes—and injuries—can happen. ArcBest, an Arkansas-based logistics company, developed its Vaux Smart Autonomy technology to make warehouses more efficient, effective, and safe. The technology features autonomous mobile robot (AMR) forklifts that can move goods with little human intervention required. The company's ability to develop and deploy technology that transforms logistics earned ArcBest a spot as one of Fast Company's 2024 Next Big Things in Tech. Dennis Anderson, ArcBest's chief strategy and innovation officer, shares his insights on how automation is helping to solve big issues in the supply chain world. 1 What are the key challenges ArcBest and Vaux Smart Autonomy are…

WHILE RESTAURANTS ACROSS AMERICA ditch seating in favor of quickly serving delivery and take-out crowds, fast-casual Mediterranean chain Cava is bringing people inside. In 2024, Cava debuted its “Project Soul” initiative, adding cushioned seating, a warmer color palette, and lots of greenery to its dining rooms, which had been built, 15 years ago, to look clean and modern, though not particularly Mediterranean. The redesign is part of a larger plan to elevate the customer experience inside the chain's 352 fast-casual restaurants, where guests order at the counter—building bowls and pita sandwiches from a line of ingredients—and pay before sitting down. Two-thirds of Cava's guests come into the restaurant to order at the counter (the remaining third order digitally, through Cava's mobile app or via delivery services). For them, Cava prioritizes…

With just weeks to go before Election Day 2024, AS CANVASSERS BLANKETED SWING STATES AND presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris sat for podcasts, the software engineers at trading platform Robinhood were racing to the finish line too. Their goal: to launch a new product that would allow users to bet on the election. Interest in prediction markets, which let people take a position on the outcome of specific events, had been skyrocketing. Thanks to a favorable court ruling affirming election event contracts as a form of futures trading, Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev saw an opportunity to capture those bets without aggravating regulators. But he had to move fast. Tenev—the millennial face of Robinhood's maturing brand, complete with irony-laden mustache—is bullish on allowing users to trade what…

WHEN GILLIAN ZUCKER was interviewing with the Los Angeles Clippers back in 2014, she was eager to discuss her experience in facilities development with Steve Ballmer, the team's new billionaire owner and her future boss. In that meeting, Ballmer said the team would never build an arena. That didn't last. A few weeks later, Ballmer decided the Clippers needed their own venue after sharing the Crypto.com Arena with the Lakers. The Intuit Dome finally opened ahead of the 2024–2025 NBA season, and it was worth the wait. The specs are eye-popping: five basketball courts; an 80,000-square-foot outdoor plaza; a massive training space with an indoor pool; and a double-sided “halo board” that stretches almost a full acre. It's all encased in an LEED Platinum–certified, carbon-neutral building. A steel-canopy rooftop pulls…

IN THE AGE OF AI, BUSINESSES FACE A PROBLEM: HOW to turn their unstructured data into something useful. This raw information—emails, memos, slide decks, and more— lacks consistency, often leaving AI models unable to ingest it. That's where Unstructured comes in, helping organizations unlock the potential of their own data. Engineers can spend up to three-quarters of their time cleaning up data before it can be fed into LLMs, says Unstructured CEO Brian Raymond. His company's software automates that process, breaking down documents into identifiable components that can be quickly analyzed for integration into a model. “We transform them into a machine-readable format,” Raymond says. Unstructured launched its open-source software in 2022 and is now helping large organizations and government agencies alike. It released a commercial API last year, allowing…

SHARKNINJA HAS COME A LONG WAY SINCE its infomercial days of the mid-aughts. The company—and its 1,100-person design and engineering team—has turned into one of the most sophisticated manufacturers of domestic appliances on the planet, packaging advanced engineering into novel, easy-to-use, affordable products. SharkNinja more than doubled its product portfolio in 2024 as part of its expansion into categories ranging from outdoor gear (a Yeti-like cooler) to beauty (Dysonesque hairstyling tools) to home (a fan that moves with you). But its runaway hit last year was in a category of its own: the Ninja Slushi, an at-home frozen-drink maker. Before launching online in July, the $300 Slushi amassed a 200,000-person waitlist, and it has since sold out 15 times. This success stems from the company's obsessive approach to quality control,…

WHEN IT COMES TO WATCHing TV, Tubi isn't letting anything stand in viewers' way. That starts with cost. While other streaming services have hiked subscription fees, Fox-owned Tubi is sticking to its ad-supported model, which gives every viewer free access to its library of 275,000 movies and TV episodes, from syndicated '70s sitcoms to art-house mainstays. That's helped the service rocket from 51 million monthly active users in 2022 to 97 million in 2024. “Because we're free, we live and die by engagement—that aligns our incentives to put the viewer first,” says CEO Anjali Sud. Tubi doesn't require users to create an account to begin watching, and the service is available across 33 operating systems, including those of just about every smart TV. “We want to get you into the…

WHEN ROMAN STERLINGOV WAS FOUND GUILTY, LAST March, of money laundering and other charges related to the operation of a cryptocurrency service called Bitcoin Fog, his conviction marked a watershed moment for the Department of Justice in its fight against crypto criminality. According to prosecutors, Sterlingov, 36, a dual citizen of Russia and Sweden, had been running Bitcoin Fog as a dark web “mixer” designed to obscure the origin and destination of on-chain crypto transactions. Over the course of a decade, the service had grown into a hive of criminal activity on a massive scale, facilitating the transfer of 1.2 million Bitcoin (or about $400 million at the time) for the sale of everything from narcotics to child pornography. In November, Sterlingov was sentenced to 12 and a half years…

BEING A FAN OF ANIME IN THE aughts meant you either had to know Japanese or rely on the kindness of internet strangers, who would upload their own subtitled versions of popular series to video-hosting site Crunchyroll, which launched in 2006. In the nearly two decades since, anime has crossed from subculture into mainstream pop culture among Western audiences, with Crunchyroll leading the way. The former pirate site is now the elder statesman of anime, with a library of more than 2,000 titles and simulcasts of some 200 series annually. Acquired by Sony in 2021, Crunchyroll also invests in and produces shows itself. This commitment to the genre has paid off: In 2021, Crunchyroll had 5 million paying subscribers to its premium tiers, which start at $7.99 a month; by…

EVERY DAY, Americans spend hundreds of millions of dollars on food, yet very little of that money directly changes how food is grown. But in recent years, a small yet growing fraction of such transactions—at select restaurants, markets, cafés, and coffee shops—have started actively financing efforts to make farming more sustainable, thanks to the work of Zero Foodprint (ZFP). Former restaurateurs Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz (of Mission Chinese Food) shifted the focus of their four-year-old nonprofit in 2019 after realizing that their latest venture—a “closed loop” restaurant called the Perennial—wasn't moving the agricultural needle. “We'd been trying to change farming by changing eating,” Myint says, “when we should just try to change farming.” Research shows that Americans are open to paying a premium for sustainably made things. In a…

WONDER IS CHANGING FOOD DELIVERY by building a restaurant and mealtime super app and the infrastructure to support it. Launched in 2018 by serial entrepreneur Marc Lore, Wonder procures recipes from well-known chefs, such as Bobby Flay, and restaurants, like Washington, D.C.'s Maydan. It modifies them so that Wonder employees can cook the dishes quickly inside Wonder's kitchens. Then it delivers the food—fast—to diners who place orders through Wonder's app. The company grew from 10 to 35 storefronts last year, mainly in and around New York City, and will expand into Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., this year. Each location, which the company says became profitable shortly after opening, houses up to 30 food brands; some are existing restaurants, while others are original concepts developed exclusively for Wonder. For customers, it's…

AFTER DISRUPTING THE baby-care market a decade ago with its “snot sucker” and extending its taboo-defying mission to postpartum salves for new parents (e.g., iced maxi pads), Frida launched a line in 2023 that went even further: Frida Fertility. “Your whole life, you're taught how not to have a baby, and then when it comes time to actually want a child, you find yourself at the dark depths of the internet trying to patchwork together a conception plan,” says Frida founder and CEO Chelsea Hirschhorn, herself a mother of four. Frida's $50 at-home insemination kits include applicators and a semen deposit cup. The broader line adds supplements for egg and sperm health, ovulation tests, conceptionfriendly lubricant, and a first-of-itskind collapsible urine-sample cup. (The full line is sold at CVS, Walmart,…

IN EARLY 2024, BEN COLLINS WAS CONTEMPLATING the future of the media business—and his place in it. He was in the process of resigning after spending six years as a senior reporter at NBC News, exhausted by the disinformation beat that took him to some of the darkest and most disturbing corners of the internet. It hadn't helped that in December 2022 NBC News had suspended Collins from the Elon Musk beat following his highly critical coverage of the gazillionaire's acquisition of Twitter. The media landscape looked bleak. Layoffs were decimating storied media titles like Sports Illustrated, and Collins was hearing rumors that G/O Media, the holding company owned by private equity firm Great Hill Partners, was looking to shed 36-year-old satirical news publication The Onion from its portfolio. (G/O…

The rehabbed mid-century warehouse on San Francisco's southeastern fringe carries no obvious signage. NESTLED AMONG MUNDANE BUSInesses (a refrigerated truck company, a door installation service, a drywall distributor), it seems wholly unremarkable—at least until you notice that the white Jaguar I-Pace electric SUVs that keep pulling into its parking area don't have anyone in their drivers' seats. They're Waymo autonomous cars—often called robotaxis—and the building is their depot. On this quiet Friday morning, dozens are on the premises, a meaningful chunk of the city's fleet of more than 300. Many are merely charging up for their next tour of duty. Others are cleaning their own sensors, emitting faintly comical squirting and huffing sounds as they do. And some, needing tire repair or replacement parts, are here to get attention from…

WHEN BASKETBALL STARS CAITLIN Clark, Angel Reese, and Cameron Brink rolled up to the Brooklyn Academy of Music last April for the 2024 WNBA draft, they signaled the arrival of a new generation of talent—and the league's cultural ascendance. Tickets for the event sold out in 15 minutes; viewership on ESPN averaged 2.4 million people, up 328% over 2023; and photos of the new WNBA players showing off their signature style on the red carpet lit up social media. The event turned out to be a microcosm of the 2024 season, in which the 28-year-old league leveled up in every measurable category. By the end of the season, the league had secured a new $2.2 billion, 11-year mediarights deal with Disney, Amazon, and NBCUniversal, set to begin in 2026. That…

AS A CARDIOLOGIST, SHIV RAO HAD GOTTEN USED to “pajama work”—documentation done after clinical hours, often late at night. Most clinicians report spending almost two hours a day after their offices close on typing up the notes and records necessary for treatment plans and insurance payment. That's why Rao launched Abridge, an AI platform that can turn conversations between doctors and patients into clinical notes in real time. While documenting the visit, Abridge's platform can generate insurance billing codes based on diagnoses and treatments being discussed. Last year, the company boosted its language-recognition capabilities via an Nvidia partnership (it now understands nearly 100 languages) and allowed doctors to access the platform directly within the widely used medical record software Epic. Abridge says its tool has helped reduce burnout by as…

YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW IT FROM the parade of SpaceX and Blue Origin headlines, but there's another player in the space-launch business— one that's considerably less flashy than the Elon Musk– and Jeff Bezos– owned companies, but gaining fast. Nineteen-year-old Rocket Lab notched a record 16 launches of its Electron rockets in 2024, up from 10 in 2023. That meant Rocket Lab accounted for the second most launches among U.S. operators in 2024. While SpaceX and Blue Origin have focused on medium- and heavy-lift rockets, Rocket Lab—founded in New Zealand and now headquartered in Long Beach, California—has made its name with the light-lift Electron, which carries smaller payloads. But the reliability and precision of these rockets, which are made of lightweight carbon composite and use 3D printed engines, allow Rocket…

YOUTUBE'S CREATORS ARE becoming prime-time TV. Viewers now stream more than 1 billion hours of YouTube on their physical TVs every day, surpassing the amount of time they watch on their phones. “When people turn on the TV, they're turning on YouTube,” CEO Neal Mohan says. The trend isn't entirely new. Nielsen started tracking YouTube TV viewership in 2017, and YouTube gained significant yardage toward its living room goal with its $2-billion-a-year deal to stream NFL Sunday Ticket games, which kicked off in 2023. But now YouTube is letting creators in on the action. As of this year, YouTubers can package their content into “seasons” and “episodes” just like traditional TV series, enabling viewers to binge-watch even more easily. Creators also have access to new AI dubbing tools for several…

WE ARE AWASH WITH PRODUCTIVity tools. The simple act of choosing which note-taking app, digital to-do list, or project management planner to use is itself a task. This helps explain why the all-in-one workspace Notion has attracted such an avid user base: The platform's modular design allows users to customize the app, adding and arranging its wide array of digital organizing tools into a near-endless variety of visual templates to fit their needs. The company aims to give users the “building blocks” they want, explains cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao. Last year, it offered them a big one in the form of Notion Calendar, which integrates with Notion's workspace and outside calendar services to provide a unified view of tasks and deadlines. (It's available as a stand-alone app, too.) The…

America loves watching football on television—in 2023, NFL games accounted for 93% of the most-watched shows and programs in the country. This past season, Amazon Prime Video introduced an innovative technology that is bringing a new level of insight to veteran and rookie fans alike. Defensive Alerts—a real-time onscreen feature powered by ar tificial intelligence—gives viewers a bet ter understanding of the battles that occur during pass rushes. Amazon Prime Video's track record of elevating the TV viewing experience earned it a place among Fast Company's list of Next Big Things in Tech for 2024. Here, Eric Orme, vice president of live sports product and engineering at Prime Video, discusses this exciting interactive technology.  1 How does Defensive Alerts work, and how has it changed the way football fans understand…

THE DATA CENTERS POWERING the AI revolution require energy— lots of it. And up to 40% of that energy goes toward cooling equipment, especially the electric motors of industrial-grade fans. Infinitum, a motor manufacturer outside Austin, has reengineered these motors to be lighter, smaller, quieter, and far more efficient than conventional models, which typically deliver more horsepower than a data center actually needs. Infinitum unveiled the latest version of its Aircore EC last year, for use in data centers, HVAC equipment, pumps, and more. The system's modular design allows for customizable, easy-to-repair systems tailored to precise horsepower, torque, speed, and voltage requirements. The stationary, magnetized part of the motor (known as the stator) consists of a printed circuit board that requires 60% less copper and none of the heavy iron…

IN HIS TWO DECADES OVERSEEING the basic-cable network FX, John Landgraf has earned a reputation for producing original shows that stand out from the usual fare, starting with the post-9/11 firefighter drama Rescue Me. Last year, he outdid even his own record by proving—through some risky bets—that there's a place for thoughtful TV that holds your attention even in a dumbed-down streaming era when viewers halfwatch shows on their phones. The surprise hit Shōgun, adapted from James Clavell's 1975 door-stopper of a novel, became FX's most-watched new show ever, racking up 23.9 million views worldwide on Disney+ and Hulu. The series reportedly cost an eye-popping $250 million for its first, 10-episode season, and connected with American viewers despite being set in 17th-century Japan and almost entirely subtitled. Thanks to Shōgun,…

INVENTORY INEFFICIENCIES COST the retail industry more than $1.7 trillion in 2023. Simbe's Tally robot (first introduced in 2015) automates the tedium of scanning store shelves to conduct product audits. The roughly 5-foot-tall robot traverses store aisles to perform computer-vision inventories of the shelves and floor displays, delivering real-time data about mispriced products and stock shortages. Employees can focus on customers instead of pains-takingly eyeballing labels. Tally robots automatically read barcodes and price tags—inspecting between 15,000 and 30,000 products an hour—yielding what Simbe co-founder and chief design officer Jeff Gee calls a “realogram,” enabling stores to respond quickly to changes in demand. “It's a single source of truth for actionable data,” he says. In October, Simbe launched a platform that delivers product-level data directly to brands for the first time.…

AFTER NEARLY A DECADE spent as an elite hacker for the U.S. military, Kyle Hanslovan noticed a discrepancy: While Fortune 500 companies hired dedicated teams to protect them from cybercrimes, smaller businesses typically lacked that expertise—even as they increasingly faced the same threats. “Nobody was trying to protect these businesses,” Hanslovan says. He cofounded Huntress in 2015 as a platform that partners with in-house IT departments and out-sourced teams known as managed service providers to offer round-the-clock cybersecurity to clients. Today, Huntress is the indispensable security platform for more than 150,000 small and medium-size businesses. Its software scans endpoints, data logs, and cloud identities for anomalies, and it taps AI and a torrent of historical data to predict malware and other common threats— leaving only the most critical issues to…

ALTHOUGH THE EPIPEN IS a lifeline for people with severe allergic reactions, it uses a long needle to deliver epinephrine into a muscle. “The EpiPen injector is a harpoon,” says Richard Lowenthal, cofounder and CEO of ARS Pharma, which developed epinephrine nasal spray Neffy, approved last August by the FDA. Epinephrine can't normally be absorbed through the nasal membrane, but by using it with an absorption enhancer called Intravail, “it goes from no measurable absorption to injection-like levels,” Lowenthal says. With a longer shelf life and less stringent temperature needs than injectors, Neffy makes epinephrine accessible in more public places, as well as to first responders, like police, who aren't allowed to administer injectable drugs. Since launching the drug, ARS has pushed for insurance coverage of Neffy. As of February…

LIVER TUMORS ARE TYPICALLY TREATED with chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery (or some combination of the three)—all of which are either invasive or have side effects that can rival the disease itself. But now there's a noninvasive treatment available: histotripsy, the process of liquefying cancerous tumors with ultrasound waves, resulting in minimal pain for the patient and no damage to nontargeted tissue—meaning fewer side effects. Mike Blue, CEO of HistoSonics, likes to say the company's technology is a 25-year overnight success. When the Minnesota-based company was founded in 2009 to commercialize histotripsy, the approach had been in development for nearly a decade. Researchers at the University of Michigan had invented histotripsy to destroy unwanted tissue and tumors noninvasively. But taking histotripsy from the research lab to a hospital procedure room was…

CLEANING YOUR home is hardly a sexy undertaking. But when you're obsessed with design, cleanliness, and things smelling good, it can be joyful. At least, that's how it was for Courteney Cox, the Friends-famous actor and director who has been hosting regular Sunday suppers at her Malibu home for nearly 20 years. When investor Bilal Mekkaoui (who took HelloFresh public, among other companies) attended one, he was so impressed by her homemaking that they began discussing launching a business, starting with candles. Then they met Sarah Jahnke, a veteran of L'Oréal's Viktor & Rolf and Proenza Schouler arm, and imagined a new category: highend “beauty care” for the home. Launched direct-to-consumer in 2022, Homecourt's products— including a surface cleaner, dish soap, a signature $45 room deodorant spray, and, yes, candles—come…

TWO GIRLS FAWN OVER a heartthrob in a teen magazine. Suddenly, the dreamboat in question—a long-haired rocker in black-and-white face paint— materializes in the room, holding a coffin-shaped, heavy-metal makeup kit from E.l.f. Cosmetics and water brand Liquid Death. This ad, launched in March 2024, hit 12 billion impressions in two weeks, and the limited-edition Corpse Paint sold out in less than 45 minutes. “Big brands are used to paying ad agencies millions of dollars to come up with something that does one-tenth of what this collab did,” says Liquid Death founder and CEO Mike Cessario, who spent 10 years in advertising before launching the punk-rock-inspired water brand, now majority-owned by Live Nation. For Corpse Paint, E.l.f. created the makeup and handled production costs; Liquid Death was in charge of…

WHEN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA'S wildfires broke out in January, Los Angeles County proved to have a faulty alert system, much to the shock of its residents. So Angelenos turned to a free, nonprofit app called Watch Duty, which gathers real-time intelligence to update maps that show fire perimeters, wind direction, and evacuation routes. More than 2 million new users signed up in the first week of the wildfires, and the city's emergency operations center began using the company's live map to help track the latest developments. Watch Duty launched in Northern California in 2021, after co-founder and CEO John Mills's own struggle to find information during a wildfire. Mills has a background as a tech entrepreneur, but his team includes former firefighters—which helps explain why it wasn't long before practicing firefighters…

THE BIGGEST HIT IN U.S. movie theaters last year didn't appear on screens but in concession stands. When Dune: Part Two debuted in March, filmgoers were able to purchase a $25 popcorn bucket that hid the popped kernels behind a flexible ring lined with toothy plastic tentacles, as if it were the mouth of one of the film's sandworms. The vessel spawned an army of memes and even a sketch on SNL—while selling out so quickly that some fans resold them on eBay for as much as $800. “We didn't think it would be as electrifying as it was,” says Peter Cleary, CEO of the Australia-based marketing firm Zinc, which created the bucket. Zinc also designed strikingly original popcorn containers and soda cups for 2024's Wicked, Gladiator 2, and Moana…