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European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposes central arms reserve capitals could draw fromView the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. This deal on the refurbished Apple Watch Ultra (GPS + Cellular) for $359.99 on Woot (for the next six days or until it sells out) is tempting—especially considering that it’s going for over $445 on Amazon. That’s a solid price cut, but the catch is, this is a refurbished unit. That means some level of wear and tear is expected, but it has been tested to be fully functional with at least 80% battery capacity, and Woot backs it with a two-year limited warranty. If you’re OK with a few cosmetic imperfections in exchange for savings, this might be worth grabbing—just note that it’s only available for shipping within the contiguous U.S. Prime members also get free shipping, while non-members will have to pay $6. Apple Watch Ultra (GPS + Cellular) $359.99 at Woot $445.00 Save $85.01 Get Deal Get Deal $359.99 at Woot $445.00 Save $85.01 As for the Apple Watch Ultra itself, this thing is built tough. Designed for extreme conditions, its MIL-STD 810H certification means it can handle freezing temps, high altitudes, sandstorms, and general rough treatment. Apple says it’ll keep working between -4 and 130 degrees Fahrenheit, which is overkill for most people but great if you’re into extreme sports or outdoor adventures. The GPS + Cellular connectivity of this model is a big advantage, too, letting you take calls, stream music, or use maps even when you’re away from your phone—a huge plus for runners, hikers, and anyone who hates being tied to their iPhones. Also, its 1.9-inch OLED Retina screen is ridiculously bright at 2,000 nits, making it super easy to read in direct sunlight. The Apple Watch Ultra runs on watchOS 9, packing features like heart rate zone data, sleep stage tracking, advanced running metrics, and more. It also includes Apple’s safety and health tools like car crash detection and overnight body temperature tracking. Battery life holds up well, lasting 55 to 57 hours with normal use, even with the always-on display enabled, notes this PCMag review. If you want one of the most rugged Apple Watch ever made at a lower price (and don’t mind some cosmetic flaws), this Woot deal is worth considering before it sells out. But if you’d rather have a newer model without the Ultra’s bulk, the Series 10 ($359, down from $429) is the best iPhone-compatible smartwatch for most users, while the Watch SE ($249) is the best budget-friendly option, according to this PCMag "Best Smartwatches for 2025" roundup. View the full article

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte is the new chair for both and he has removed several members while adding a few new names at each. View the full article

Tesla sinks as investors shift away from riskier holdingsView the full article

Hulu's lineup of original content is lighter in April than in previous months but includes the sixth and final season of The Handmaid's Tale (April 8), the dystopian drama based originally on Margaret Atwood's novel but that has long since evolved into a world of its own. According to the Hulu synopsis, June (Elisabeth Moss), Luke, and Moira make up the resistance to bring down Gilead. A sequel series, The Testaments, also based on an Atwood novel of the same name, is in development for release after The Handmaid's Tale ends. Hulu has a new original reality competition show launching in April to take on Peacock's hit series The Traitors. On Got to Get Out (April 11), 20 contestants are racing against time to steal $1 million from each other and escape without getting caught. The show is hosted by Simi Liu and includes reality stars like Spencer Pratt, Cynthia Bailey, and Val Chmerkovskiy. April also brings season two of Hulu original series No Man's Land (April 16) about the Syrian war and a new standup special from Jessica Kirson (I'm the Man, April 25). Here’s everything else coming to (and leaving) Hulu in April. What’s coming to Hulu in April 2025Arriving April 1Arrival (2016) Arrival En Espanol (2016) The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) Black Swan (2010) Boys on the Side (1995) Concussion (2015) Concussion En Espanol (2015) Copycat (1995) Enough Said (2013) The Equalizer (2014) The Equalizer En Espanol (2014) Gifted (2017) The Good Thief (2003) Gone Girl (2014) Gulliver's Travels (2010) The History of the World Part I (1981) I Heart Huckabees (2004) Interstellar (2014) Interstellar En Espanol (2014) Jumanji (1995) Jumanji En Espanol (1995) Jurassic Park (1993) Jurassic Park III (2001) The Karate Kid (1984) The Karate Kid En Espanol (1984) The Karate Kid Part II (1986) The Karate Kid: Part II En Espanol (1986) The Karate Kid Part III (1989) The Karate Kid Part III En Espanol (1989) Little Man (2006) Little Man En Espanol (2006) The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) Made in America (1993) Me, Myself and Irene (2000) Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) Oddity Red Sparrow (2018) The Revenant (2015) Runaway Jury (2003) Sexy Beast (2001) Shark Tale (2004) The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) Superbad (2007) Superbad En Espanol (2007) Tombstone (1993) True Story (2015) 21 Jump Street (2012) 22 Jump Street (2014) Wall Street (1987) Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) War of the Worlds (2005) Widows (2018) Wild (2014) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) The Wolf Of Wall Street En Espanol (2013) Year One (2009) You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010) Arriving April 2Beyblade X: Complete Season 1B Arriving April 3Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day in America: Complete Limited Series Arriving April 4FX's Dying for Sex: Complete Limited Series Fire Force: Season 3 Premiere (Subbed) Classified (2024) The Darjeeling Limited (2007) Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) Rushmore (1999) Arriving April 5American Monster: Complete Season 3 Bering Sea Gold: Complete Season 3 Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives: Complete Seasons 1-2 I Love A Mama's Boy: Complete Season 2 The World According to Allee Willis (2024) Arriving April 6Witch Watch: Series Premiere (Subbed & Dubbed) Arriving April 8The Handmaid's Tale: Sixth & Final Season Premiere Small Things Like These (2024) Arriving April 9Angels & Demons (2009) The Da Vinci Code (2006) Arriving April 10Court Cam: Complete Season 7 Houses of Horror: Secrets of College Greek Life: Complete Season 1 Ca$h (2010) Hesher (2010) Niko: Beyond the Northern Lights (2024) Red Dog (2011) So Undercover (2012) Spun (2002) Arriving April 11Got to Get Out: Series Premiere Garfield (2004) Garfield: A Tail Of Two Kitties (2006) Magpie (2024) Arriving April 12Fixer Upper: Complete Season 5 MythBusters: Complete Season 5 The Family Chantel: Complete Season 4 Arriving April 15Lake George (2024) Arriving April 16No Man's Land: Complete Season 2 Synduality Noir: Complete Season 1 (Dubbed) The Curious Case of Natalia Grace: Complete Season 3 Arriving April 17The Stolen Girl: Series Premiere Bible Secrets Revealed: Complete Season 1 Gangland Chronicles: Complete Season 1 Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Complete Seasons 1 and 2 Martin Short: Complete Season 1 The Girl Who Wasn't Dead (2024) Arriving April 18The Order (2024) Arriving April 19Breaking Amish: Complete Season 4 Disappeared: Complete Season 6 Gypsy Sisters: Complete Season 3 Moonshiners: Complete Season 13 Arriving April 21Secrets of the Penguins: Complete Limited Series No Hard Feelings (2023) No Hard Feelings En Espanol (2023) Arriving April 22In a Violent Nature (2024) Arriving April 24Airline Wars: Complete Season 1 Customer Wars: Complete Season 4 Tell Me How I Died: Complete Season 1 Tiny House World: Complete Season 1 Husband, Father, Killer: The Alyssa Pladl Story Arriving April 25Jessica Kirson: I'm the Man: Special Premiere Azrael (2024) Arriving April 26Chopped: Complete Season 60 Four Weddings: Complete Season 9 House Hunters Renovation: Complete Season 16 Jessica Chambers: An ID Murder Mystery: Complete Season 1 Arriving April 29Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2024) What’s leaving Hulu in April 2025Leaving April 6Agnes (2021) Leaving April 13She Will (2021) Leaving April 16Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) Leaving April 20Totally Under Control (2020) Leaving April 24The Good Neighbor (2022) Leaving April 27Resurrection (2022) Leaving April 30After Everything (2018) Code Name Banshee (2022) Stars Fell Again (2023) View the full article

Arizona’s highest court has created a pair of AI-generated avatars to deliver news of every ruling issued by the justices, marking what is believed to be the first example in the U.S. of a state court system tapping artificial intelligence to build more humanlike characters to connect with the public. A court in Florida uses an animated chatbot to help visitors navigate its website, but the Arizona Supreme Court is charting new territory with the creation of Victoria and Daniel. Made of pixels, the two avatars have a different job in that they serve as the face of news coming from the court just as a spokesperson made of flesh and blood would do—but faster. The use of AI has touched nearly every profession and discipline, growing exponentially in recent years and showing infinite potential when it comes to things as simple as internet searches or as complex as brain surgery. For officials with the Arizona Supreme Court, their venture into AI is rooted in a desire to promote trust and confidence in the judicial system. What helped solidify the court’s need for more public outreach? There was a protest outside the state Capitol last April and calls for two justices to be booted after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a Civil War–era law that banned nearly all abortions, except when a woman’s life is in jeopardy, could be enforced. Emotions flared on both sides of the issue. When Chief Justice Ann Timmer took over the court last summer, she made public trust a key pillar of her platform. She had already been thinking about ways to reach out to the public using digital media for a few years, and the abortion ruling, among other rulings, helped her to solidify the idea that the court needs to be part of the narrative as people learn about opinions and what they mean. “We serve the public better by saying, OK, we’ve issued this decision,” she said. “Now, let us help you understand what it is.” Timmer told the Associated Press earlier this year that if the court had to do the abortion ruling over again, it would have approached the dissemination of information differently. In a Wednesday interview, she said that a news release and avatar video could have helped the public better understand the legal underpinnings of the lengthy decision—possibly including what it didn’t do, which she said some misunderstood. “We got a lot of backlash for it and probably deservedly so, in terms of how can we complain that people don’t understand what we did when we didn’t really do enough to give a simplified version,” she said in the January interview, explaining that people want to know the basis for the court’s decisions and what they can do, such as lobbying state lawmakers for whatever changes in law would support their positions. Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a repeal of the ban last May, and in November, Arizona voters approved a constitutional amendment expanding abortion access up to the point of fetal viability. Who are Daniel and Victoria, and how do they work? Created with a program called Creatify, Daniel and Victoria in a way bring to life the court’s news releases. Videos featuring one or the other are being posted for every ruling by the high court, and may be used for Access to Justice projects, community programs and civics information in the future. The court has been sending out releases since October to summarize and explain rulings. After seeing success with the releases, it began exploring options to convey that information through video. The AI-generated avatars were the most efficient way to produce videos and get the information out, said court spokesperson Alberto Rodriguez. Producing a video usually can take hours, he said, but an AI-generated video is ready in about 30 minutes. The court might introduce more AI-generated reporters in the future, Rodriguez said in a news release. The justice who authors the legal opinion also drafts a news release, the wording of which must be approved by the entire bench. The justice then works with the court’s communications team to craft a script for the avatars—the avatars aren’t interpreting original court decisions or opinions, Rodriguez said. Daniel and Victoria’s names and physical appearances were designed to represent a wide cross-section of people, Rodriguez said. He said they aren’t meant to come off as real people and the court emphasizes their AI origins with disclaimers. The court is exploring different emotional deliveries, cadences, and pronunciations as well as Spanish translations for the avatars, Rodriguez said. Will the avatars resonate with their audience? Mason Kortz, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, described the court’s new cyber employees as “quite realistic.” While their voices might give them away, he said some people could be fooled into thinking that Daniel and Victoria are real reporters if viewers are only reading the subtitles and looking at the characters’ movements and facial expressions. Kortz also said it would be better for the language of the disclaimer that is in the videos’ text description to be featured more prominently. “You want to make it as hard as possible for someone to advertently or inadvertently remove the disclaimer,” he said. Asheley Landrum, associate professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, said the avatars feel robotic. She said a format that mimics real dialogue and storytelling might be more engaging than an AI reading of a news release. “Because it’s not just about using AI or even creating videos,” she said, “but about doing so in a way that really resonates with audiences.” Still, it’s fine line. She said engaging characteristics can help to build trust over time but the danger is that content could appear biased. —Sejal Govindarao, Associated Press View the full article

Disney+ has sophomore seasons of two significant series coming in April. The second installment of Lucasfilm's Emmy-nominated thriller Andor—the prequel to Rogue One and set five years prior—tells the origin story of Rebel spy Cassian Andor and the formation of the Rebel Alliance. Diego Luna reprises his role from the film and the first season of the series. A three-episode premiere is set for 6 p.m. PT on April 22, with additional episodes dropping weekly on Tuesdays until mid-May. Also on the April schedule is season two of Doctor Who. Ncuti Gatwa stars as the Doctor, who is on a quest to get Belinda Chandra (played by Varadu Sethu) back to Earth. Millie Gibson stars as Ruby Sunday, with a guest appearance from Alan Cumming. After the premiere on Saturday, April 12, new episodes will be released weekly. Other content premiering in April includes season two of Light & Magic (April 18), a three-part docuseries about Lucasfilm's visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic, and Disney+ Original documentary film Pets (April 11) from director Bryce Dallas Howard. Disney+ will also be wrapping up weekly episodes of Marvel Television’s Daredevil: Born Again (Tuesdays through April 15) and releasing the final two installments of the six-part NatGeo docuseries David Blaine Do Not Attempt (April 7), which premiered last month. Here's everything coming to Disney+ in April. Disney Plus series with new episodes weekly in April 2025Andor (Season 2)—Disney+ Original, new episodes on Tuesdays beginning April 22 Marvel Television’s Daredevil: Born Again—new episodes on Tuesdays through April 15 Doctor Who (Season 2)—new episodes on Saturdays beginning April 12 Disney+ will also be streaming SC+, a SportsCenter show exclusive to the platform, every weekday at 6 a.m. PT and on weekend mornings. Each stream will be available for 24 hours. Movies and complete series/seasons coming to Disney Plus in April 2025Arriving April 1Lost Treasures of Rome (S2, 6 episodes) National Parks: USA (S1, 5 episodes) RoboGobo (S1, 24 episodes) Arriving April 3Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day in America (S1, 3 episodes) Arriving April 7David Blaine Do Not Attempt Not Just a Goof Arriving April 9Marvel’s Spidey and His Amazing Friends (S3, 4 episodes) Arriving April 11The Abyss 4K Pets Arriving April 12Titanic: The Digital Resurrection To Catch a Smuggler (S8, 8 episodes) Arriving April 16Big City Greens (S4, 7 episodes) SuperKitties (S2, 3 episodes) Arriving April 18Light & Magic (Season 2) Arriving April 21Secret of the Penguins (S1, 3 episodes) Arriving April 22ABC News Live Special: Last Lands (S1, 4 episodes) Sea Lions of the Galapagos Guardians of the Galapagos Arriving April 25Megastructures: Real Madrid Super Stadium Arriving April 30Chibi Tiny Tales: Shorts (S5, 7 episodes) Mickey Mouse Funhouse (S3, 5 episodes) Hulu + ESPN content coming to Disney+ in April 2025As in previous months, Disney+ subscribers will also have access to select content from Hulu and ESPN in March, including live streams of PGA Tour and NWSL events, the NCAA Women's Gymnastics Championships, and select NHL games. Here are a few of the other titles coming to Disney+: Clipped Tell Me Lies Interior Chinatown It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia White Collar Reasonable Doubt Prey Crazy Hearts Say Anything The Night House College Gameday Pardon the Interruption The Mina Kimes Show featuring Lenny Vince's Places P.K.'s Places E60 Once Upon a Time in Anaheim No Easy Victories: The 1994 New York Rangers View the full article

China’s energy and auto giant BYD has announced an ultra fast EV charging system that it says is nearly as quick as a fill up at the pumps. BYD, China’s largest EV maker, said Monday that its flash-chargers can provide a full charge for its latest EVs within five to eight minutes, similar to the amount of time needed to fill a fuel tank. It plans to build more than 4,000 of the new charging stations across China. Charging times and limited ranges have been a major factor constraining the switch from gas and diesel vehicles to EVs, though Chinese drivers have embraced that change, with sales of battery powered and hybrid vehicles jumping 40% last year. BYD’s news appeared to give Tesla a jolt on Monday, as the U.S. EV maker’s share price sank 4.8%. BYD, which stands for build your dreams, began pre-sales of its Han L and Tang L models, which are upgraded versions of earlier models. The Chinese company started out making batteries and has been refining its battery and energy storage technology while building an auto empire that is expanding outside China. It says its 1 megawatt flash chargers can provide power for 400 kilometers (nearly 250 miles) in five minutes. Ultra-high voltage and a large current are required to maximize charging speeds, BYD’s founder Wang Chuanfu said in a statement. “To completely solve users’ anxiety over charging, our pursuit is to make the charging time for EVs as short as the refueling time for fuel vehicles,” Wang said. The company also said that its flash-charging system relies on silicon carbide power chips with voltage levels of up to 1,500V that it developed on its own. Its Blade lithium-ion phosphate battery is perhaps the world’s safest and most efficient EV battery, with Tesla opting to use it in some of its EVs, industry analyst Michael Dunne said in a recent report. BYD reported it made just over 4.3 million “new energy vehicles” last year, up 41% from a year earlier, including 1.8 million battery electric vehicles and 2.5 million plug in hybrids. The price of its shares traded on China’s smaller market in Shenzhen has surged nearly 50% in the past six months. While BYD’s fanciest, latest premium models are expected to sell for up to about $40,000, it also makes much less expensive EVs including the Seagull, which sells for around $12,000 in China. BYD barely nudged ahead of Tesla in production of battery-powered EVs in 2024, making 1,777,965 compared with Tesla’s 1,773,443. In early January, Tesla said its sales dropped in 2024, a first in more than a dozen years, as rivals such as BMW, Volkswagen and BYD gained market shares with competitive EVs. But BYD has weaknesses as well, Dunne said, noting that JD Power’s 2024 China New Energy Vehicle Initial Quality Study ranked the BYD Seal and BYD Song Plus battery electrics at the bottom of its rankings. —Elaine Kurtenbach, AP Business Writer View the full article

New residential construction increased 11.2% to an annualized rate of 1.5 million in February, according to government data released Tuesday. View the full article

It's no surprise that companies continue to experiment with new AI features. Artificial intelligence has been the center of emerging tech for nearly three years now, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But whether you love generative AI or you find it useless, I think we can all agree that using AI to write Instagram comments is pretty stupid. And yet, Meta appears to be testing exactly that. As reported by SocialMediaToday, some Instagram accounts are now seeing a new icon to the left of the text field after choosing to leave a comment on a post. When you tap this icon (a pencil with a star), you pull up a new Meta AI menu, which presents a series of comment choices, presumably based on whatever content you happen to be looking at. In one example, the bot offers three choices: "Cute living room setup," "Love the cozy atmosphere," or "Great photo shoot location." Could there be anything lazier than this? I'll admit: This news took me a bit off guard. I know Meta is comfortable shoving its AI experiments down our throats—often with no way to turn them off. But even as it becomes more difficult to avoid AI-generated content on Meta's platforms, I didn't think the company would offload the "effort" of having to write comments to the bots. I can't imagine many (or perhaps any) Instagram users are so busy or exhausted that they'd rather scroll through an AI's idea of what to say rather than say something themselves. The human-generated comments on Instagram pages are already low-effort as it is; not to mention, there are too many comments from bots on social media platforms. Do we really want more bots in the comments, only this time sent to us by real people? We need to stop letting AI make the decisionsThis is just an experiment, and likely a limited one at that. For what it's worth, I do not have the option on my Instagram account, so I guess I'm forced to think up my own comments for now. (Or at least open another app to ask a different AI to generate a comment for me.) But this experiment speaks to the current state of AI in tech: offering solutions to problems that don't exist. Writing comments isn't hard, and yet, someone at Meta thought there was a usefulness—a market—for AI-generated comments. They probably want more training data for their AI machine, which tracks, considering companies are running out of internet for models to learn from. But that doesn't mean we should be okay with outsourcing all human tasks to AI. That's what bugs me most: ceding so many of our cognitive tasks and decisions to the machines. If you're on Instagram, you're already letting the algorithm choose the content you see. Please don't hand over even more decisions to the machines, as low-effort as those decisions may be. If you do see the experiment on your end, I encourage you not to use it; both for your own sake, as well as depriving Meta of any more training data generated by its user base for free. View the full article

Greenpeace used malicious and deceptive tactics to disrupt the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline and keep it from going forward, an attorney for the company behind the project said Monday. But attorneys for the environmental advocacy group said during their closing arguments that Greenpeace had little involvement with the 2016-17 protests that are central to the case. A North Dakota jury began deliberating Monday after a weekslong trial over Dallas-based Energy Transfer’s argument that Greenpeace defamed the company and disrupted the project. What is the case about? The energy company and its subsidiary Dakota Access accused Greenpeace International, Greenpeace USA and funding arm Greenpeace Fund Inc. of defamation, civil conspiracy, trespass, nuisance and other acts, and is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Nine jurors and two alternates heard the case after it went to trial in late February. Their verdict will include what damages, if any, to award. Trey Cox, an attorney for the pipeline company, highlighted damages per claim totaling nearly $350 million. The lawsuit is linked to the protests against the oil pipeline and its controversial Missouri River crossing upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation. The tribe has long opposed the pipeline as a risk to its water supply. The pipeline has been transporting oil since mid-2017. What did the company say? Cox said Greenpeace exploited a small, disorganized, local issue to promote its agenda, calling Greenpeace “master manipulators” and “deceptive to the core.” Greenpeace paid professional protesters, organized or led protester trainings, shared intelligence of the pipeline route with protesters and sent lockboxes for demonstrators to attach themselves to equipment, Cox said. Among a number of alleged defamatory statements were that the company deliberately desecrated burial grounds during construction, which Cox said was done to harm Energy Transfer’s reputation in the international investment community. The company made 140 slight adjustments to its route to avoid disturbing sacred or cultural sites, he said. Greenpeace’s “lies impacted lenders,” Cox said. Energy Transfer suffered $96 million in lost financing and $7 million in public relations costs, he said. The pipeline was delayed by five months, and the company lost $80 million because it couldn’t turn on the spigot on Jan. 1, 2017, when oil was to start flowing, Cox said. He asked the jury to find the Greenpeace entities liable. “It needs to be done for Morton County. It needs to be done for Morton County’s law enforcement and the next community where Greenpeace exploits an opportunity to push its agenda at any cost,” Cox told the jury, referring to the county where the protests were centered. How did Greenpeace respond? Attorneys for Greenpeace said Energy Transfer didn’t prove its case or meet its legal burden for defamation or damages, that Greenpeace employees had little or no presence or involvement in the protests, and that Greenpeace had nothing to do with the company’s delays in construction or refinancing. A letter signed by leaders of Greenpeace International and Greenpeace USA and sent to banks involved in the project’s construction loan contained the alleged defamatory statement about desecrating burial grounds, which Cox equated to digging up dead bodies. Greenpeace International attorney Courtney DeThomas said the other side hasn’t shown how the one act of signing a letter with 500 other organizations damaged them, and that the letter would have been sent to the banks with or without Greenpeace’s name on it. Thousands of protesters were already at Standing Rock by the time the letter was signed, she said. Greenpeace USA attorney Everett Jack Jr. disputed the company’s claims as including costs from months before and years after the protests, with no witnesses to say that the Greenpeace entities were the cause. Jack also said no law enforcement officers or any of Energy Transfer’s security personnel testified that Greenpeace was the cause of any violence or property destruction, or was a leader, organizer or instigator in the protests. He said law enforcement “did a phenomenal job of watching the protests.” Greenpeace representatives have criticized the lawsuit as an example of corporations abusing the legal system to go after critics and called it a critical test of free speech and protest rights. An Energy Transfer spokesperson said the case is about Greenpeace not following the law, not free speech. —Jack Dura, Associated Press View the full article

In the past week, law enforcement agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued a warning about the ongoing threat of Medusa ransomware. Here’s what you need to know about the threat and how you can protect yourself. What is Medusa ransomware? Ransomware is a type of software that is designed to compromise your information, allowing hackers to steal it. Once these bad actors have your data, they then contact you (or the software contacts you on their behalf), and they inform you that unless you pay a ransom, your data will either be deleted, sold to the highest bidder, or released publicly for all to see. Medusa ransomware is a specific type of ransomware that is currently making the rounds. According to a cybersecurity advisory published by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Medusa ransomware “is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS)” that has been going around since at least June 2021. The advisory states that Medusa relies on “a double extortion model”—that encrypts the data on a victim’s hard drive so they can’t access it, as well as threatens to decrypt the data and sell it to third parties or release it publicly. Users must pay a ransom in order to gain access to their encrypted files again and/or in order to ensure that the files are not disseminated to additional parties. Ransom payments can range anywhere between $100 to $1 million. The CISA says that as of February 2025, Medusa has impacted “over 300 victims from a variety of critical infrastructure sectors,” which include medical, education, legal, insurance, technology, and manufacturing. How can I protect myself and my company from Medusa? The advisory posted on the CISA’s website states that Medusa is primarily spread through phishing campaigns to steal victims’ credentials. The ransomware can also infiltrate a system through unpatched software vulnerabilities. With that in mind, the notice states that there are several steps an individual and organization can take to mitigate threats from Medusa. These include: Using long passwords on accounts. Implementing multifactor authentication (also known as MFA or 2FA) on accounts. Keeping software and operating systems on all devices up to date. Use VPNs to protect your traffic. Have multiple copies of sensitive data backed up on more than just one device. Finally, it’s always a good idea to practice common sense measures that help reduce your vulnerability to phishing attempts. This includes never clicking on a link that is emailed or texted to you if you don’t recognize the sender. Likewise, never open attachments you receive from an unknown sender. And even when a sender appears legitimate, it is always best to contact them via another channel to ensure that they, indeed, were the one who sent you a link or attachment. A common phishing tactic bad actors use is to send emails to victims that appear to be from valid or known email addresses—but when you look closely at them, you’ll see that a character or two might have been changed. For example, an “I” in an email address might have been changed to a “1”). At first glance, the email looks legitimate, but the change is a giveaway that someone is trying to misrepresent who they actually are. The CISA maintains a webpage with myriad tips detailing how to further protect yourself from ransomware. View the full article

Move risks stoking biggest backbench rebellion of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiershipView the full article

Kim Atchison was hunkered down in her grandmother’s storm shelter with her 5-year-old grandson Saturday night in their tiny Alabama hometown of Plantersville when her husband and son raced in. “Get down; get all the way down to the bottom of the cellar,” they told her, saying they could see a twister coming. Atchison said she remembers first the “dead silence” and then hearing the wind that felt like a funnel and things outside hitting against each other. “All was quiet after that because it was that fast,” she said. “Like a snap of a finger and it was gone.” Atchison and her family were among the fortunate ones to avoid being killed in the three-day outbreak of severe weather across eight states that kicked up a devastating combination of wildfires, dust storms, and tornadoes—claiming at least 42 lives since Friday. Two people were killed by a twister in Plantersville. One of the lives lost was that of 82-year-old Annie Free, who “just looked out for everyone,” Atchison’s husband said. The tornado struck Free’s home, leaving only the front patio behind. Darren Atchison spent Monday delivering granola bars and sports drinks to the pummeled neighborhood, driving his all-terrain vehicle around downed trees. More than a half-dozen houses were destroyed while others were left in rough shape, some with walls peeled clean off. The tornado flipped a trailer onto its roof and toppled trees in every direction. When Heidi Howland emerged from her home after hiding in her bedroom underneath a mattress with her husband, kids and grandkids as the twister approached, she found fallen trees and broken car windows. Many of her neighbors whose houses were damaged came to her front porch to take refuge from the rain after the storm passed Saturday night. One was Free’s daughter, who Howland said cried late into the night because the first responders couldn’t find her mother. Free’s body wasn’t found until the morning. Also killed was Dunk Pickering, a fixture in the community who often hosted live music events and helped neighbors during tough times. Neighbor John Green found Pickering’s body in the wreckage of a building just across the street from Green’s home. “Whether he knew you or not, he would help anyone,” Green said. “I’ve known him for 20 years. He’s been like that ever since the day I first met him.” Green and other neighbors spent at least five hours Saturday night pulling people from the rubble and carrying them to paramedics who were unable to reach the area because roads were blocked by debris. Wildfires in Oklahoma Wind-driven wildfires across the state destroyed more than 400 homes over the weekend and will continue to be a threat in the coming days because of high winds. Dozens of fires were still burning across the state on Monday, said Keith Merckx at Oklahoma Forestry Services, and much of the state including the Oklahoma City area remained under fire warnings. While conditions over the weekend allowed crews to get a handle on most wildfires across Texas and Oklahoma, forecasters at the National Weather Service said extremely critical fire weather conditions were expected Tuesday over an area spanning from southeastern New Mexico through the Texas Panhandle and into western Oklahoma. “These fires, once they get started, become really hard to stop. They move more quickly than our resources can keep up with,” Merckx said. Four deaths so far were blamed on the fires or high winds, according to the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management. More than 70 homes were destroyed by wildfire outbreaks Friday in and around Stillwater, home to Oklahoma State University. Tornadoes and high winds across the South In Mississippi, six people died and more than 200 were displaced by a string of tornadoes across three counties, the governor said. Within about an hour of each other on Saturday, two big tornadoes tore through Walthall County, Mississippi, according to the National Weather Service. The strongest one packed winds of 170 mph (274 kph) when it swept a well-built home from its foundation, leaving a pile of debris behind, the agency said in an updated report late Monday. Three people died in the county, including 7-year-old Carter Young, who was in a mobile home, Walthall County Coroner Chris Blackwell said. The other two people killed—Gabrielle Pierre, 34, and Jeffery Irvin, 42—were in a mobile home next door to the one where Young was found, Blackwell said. Scattered twisters and storm damage led to the deaths of at least 13 people in Missouri, including a 30-year-old man who along with his dog was found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning after he was using a generator indoors during the storm, authorities said. In Arkansas, officials confirmed three deaths. As the storm headed east, two boys ages 11 and 13 were killed when a tree fell on their home in western North Carolina early Sunday, firefighters in Transylvania County said. Firefighters found them amid the uprooted three-foot-wide tree after relatives said they had been trapped in their bedroom, officials said. A tornado touched down at about 3 a.m. Monday in a neighborhood in Perquimans County, North Carolina, destroying three mobile homes and damaging several others, according to the National Weather Service. Eight people were injured in the community, with no reported deaths, the weather service said. The community is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Norfolk, Virginia. Dust storms in Kansas and Texas High winds spurred dust storms that led to almost a dozen deaths in car crashes Friday. Eight people died in a Kansas highway pileup involving at least 50 vehicles, according to the state highway patrol. Authorities said three people also were killed in car crashes during a dust storm in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle. Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio. Associated Press writers Jamie Stengle in Dallas, Sara Cline in Tylertown, Mississippi, Jeff Martin in Atlanta, Nadia Lathan in Austin, Texas; Rebecca Reynolds in Louisville, Kentucky, and Jeff Roberson in Wayne County, Missouri, contributed. —Safiyah Riddle and John Seewer, Associated Press View the full article

Social media apps aren't exactly known for their privacy and security features, but TikTok users are getting a little bit of help with a built-in tool to monitor their account security and keep their information safe. The new Security Checkup dashboard shows you where your TikTok security is lacking with step-by-step guidance to update your settings. How to use TikTok's Security CheckupTo get to your security dashboard on TikTok, go to your profile and tap Settings and privacy > Security and permissions. Security Checkup will show you which settings have been completed and which need attention, with guidance on how to update each: Adding an email and/or phone number for account recovery Enabling two-step verification Creating a passkey with device-based authentication like Face ID or Touch Unlock Checking which devices are logged into your account (and removing any that are unauthorized or aren't in use) TikTok will also flag "unusual account behavior" and log it in your Security Checkup for you to review. TikTok isn't the only social media platform with this kind of security feature. Meta, for example, has a Security Checkup on Instagram that guides users through improving their password strength, enabling two-factor authentication, and adding account recovery information. You can find this in your profile settings (tap the three vertical lines) and go to Accounts Center > Password and Security > Security Checkup to select the account you want to evaluate. Google has a similar dashboard that shows you where you are signed in with your Google account, apps and services you've connected, recent security activity, sign-in and recovery settings, and recommendations for improving your account security. View the full article

Now that the last pint of green beer has been poured, it’s time to move on to the next reason to celebrate March: college basketball. The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) annual single-elimination tournament, more commonly known as March Madness, kicked things off over the weekend with Selection Sunday. Here’s what you need to know heading into the First Four games and how to tune in. A very brief history of March Madness On the men’s side, the tournament dates back to 1939. Eight teams competed for the Division 1 Championship title, with Oregon taking home the inaugural trophy. The women got in on the action in 1982. Since then, the Tennessee Lady Volunteers have competed in every edition of the tournament. What happened during Selection Sunday? These days, the playing field has expanded to 68 teams on both sides of the tournament. Thirty-one of the teams are picked because they automatically qualify after winning their own Division 1 conference. The other 37 are picked by the NCAA Selection Committee, who takes factors such as the team’s overall season record into consideration. After the teams are chosen, that same committee grants each one a seed or ranking. This helps ensure the playing schedule is fair and balanced. It’s hard not to be an armchair critic when the teams and seeds are announced. Almost every year has some controversy, and 2025 is no exception. Men’s fans were shocked to see the University of North Carolina included in the tournament after its 22–13 record in the 2024–25 season. Bubba Cunningham, the UNC athletic director who also sits on the Selection Committee, assured CBS that he recused himself from the process. “All the policies and procedures were followed, and Keith [Gill, the commissioner of the Sun Belt Conference] can address exactly how North Carolina was discussed because I was not in the room for any of that,” he explained, as cited by CNN. Meanwhile, women’s fans were surprised to see the UCLA Bruins take the No. 1 seed from South Carolina. This is the first time since 2021 that the Gamecocks were not given the honors. Head Coach Dawn Stanley would like to have more insight into the decision-making process. “Obviously, it’s disappointing. It really is. I’d like to get some feedback on how they came to that conclusion because we put together, we manufactured a schedule that if done right it should produce an overall number one seed,” she said, according to CBS Sports. How can I watch or stream the First Four March Madness games? Now that the beginning of the brackets are ready to go, let’s watch some hoops. The action-packed tournament starts out with the lowest seeded teams facing off in what’s known as the First Four. For the first men’s game, St. Francis will take on Alabama State on Tuesday at 6:40 p.m. ET. Here’s the full First Four men’s schedule: Tuesday, March 18: Alabama State vs. Saint Francis: 6:40 p.m. (truTV) San Diego State vs. North Carolina: 9:10 p.m. (truTV) Wednesday, March 19: American University vs. Mount St. Mary’s: 6:40 p.m. (truTV) Texas vs. Xavier: 9:10 p.m. (truTV) For the first women’s game, Iowa State and Princeton will battle it out on Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET. Here’s the full First Four women’s schedule: Wednesday, March 19: Iowa State vs. Princeton: 7 p.m. (ESPNU) UC San Diego vs. Southern U: 9 p.m. (ESPNU) Thursday, March 20: High Point vs. William & Mary: 9 p.m. (ESPNU) Columbia vs. Washington: 7 p.m. (ESPN2) Every moment of the NCAA men’s and women’s tournament will be broadcast live. Because there are numerous games, it takes multiple channels to broadcast them all. This year the First Four men’s games will be on the TruTV channel. This lesser-known cable channel is included in most traditional cable subscriptions. The women’s First Four games will be on ESPNU and ESPN2. Cord-cutters should be able to find these channels on the following streaming services, but double check your local offerings before signing up: Hulu + Live TV YouTube TV Sling TV What about the rest of the tournament? The rest of the men’s games will be spread out on CBS, TBS, and TNT, and their streaming platforms, such as Paramount+. The women’s tournament will call ESPN’s networks and ABC home. For a printable men’s bracket and full schedule click here. For a printable women’s bracket and full schedule click here. View the full article

Salary will be up to £400,000 per year, plus an annual bonus of up to 60%View the full article

Airport security will probably always be somewhat of a hassle, but one friction point you can potentially minimize is utilizing a digital ID in place of a physical one—and if you're an Android user, your passport added to Google Wallet's ID pass is officially accepted by TSA. It's certainly convenient to not have to carry or keep track of your physical passport when you travel, and a digital passport in ID pass can get you through security screening if you don't have a REAL ID after the requirements take effect on May 7. That said, your digital passport doesn't completely replace your physical document, which you'll still need when traveling internationally and in situations where you have to present identification outside of TSA. Here's how to digitize your passport and other forms of identification for the next time you fly. How to add your passport to Google WalletTo add your passport to ID pass, open Google Wallet on your Android device and tap the + icon. Tap ID > ID pass, then hit the Get Started button. The app will guide you through a series of instructions to scan your passport and your face, which will take several minutes to complete and approve. You can also add a state-issued ID (like your driver's license) to Google Wallet using this same process—just select ID > Driver's license or state ID instead of ID pass. How to use other digital IDs for travelAt the time of writing, Apple Wallet and Samsung Wallet do not support passports, and ID pass for Google Wallet is the only digital passport accepted at TSA for domestic travel. However, your driver's license or identification card stored in Apple Wallet, Google Wallet, Samsung Wallet, or a state-specific mobile app can also get you through security screening if issued by one of the following states: Arizona California Colorado Georgia Hawaii Iowa Louisiana Maryland New Mexico New York Ohio Puerto Rico Utah Virginia West Virginia To add an ID to Apple Wallet, tap the + icon in the app and hit Driver's License or State ID. Select your eligible state, and follow the prompts. For Samsung Wallet, click the + icon, tap Digital IDs > Driver's License/State ID, and follow the instructions to scan your ID and face and authenticate with your fingerprint or a PIN. Note that some of the states listed (like New York and Utah) require you to use a state-specific app for digital IDs instead of your device's digital wallet. Even if you have a digital ID, don't count on being able to use it at every airport. Check TSA's digital ID map before you leave home to make sure any airport you are traveling through accepts eligible digital IDs. (On the flip side, TSA PreCheck members traveling on Delta Airlines, United Airlines, and Alaska Airlines out of a select number of airports can clear security solely on facial recognition—no physical or digital documents required.) View the full article

It’s easy to say that the name of the advertising game has always been attention. But the level of skill, belief, strategic rigor, creative confidence, and sheer will required to win this game has never been higher or more complex. Effectively engaging with culture in this pursuit has never been more important or desired by brands and marketers than it is right now, thanks to an ever-fragmented media landscape. There is almost nothing better at attracting our attention and, importantly, keeping it. Why? Because we care. We talk to our friends and family about it. We engage in online and IRL communities about it. The brands and agencies on this year’s list are finding more unique and impactful ways to genuinely embed their work into culture, or make our experience with it better, more interesting, helpful, or entertaining. That’s what’s really earning our attention. But there is a difference between engaging with culture and chasing it. This year’s honorees have kept their work from feeling late to the game or as if it’s capitalizing on stale trends. Every brand is seemingly into collaborations, but Liquid Death comes at its unpredictable iterations from a comedy angle. Airbnb managed to create a product extension through its own cultural intermingling, and now its Icons platform allows guests to book stays in IRL pop-cultural locales. Yeti’s product quality is its baseline, but it wears its heart on its sleeve with films that can defy marketing logic yet make perfect brand emotional sense. Norwegian agency NewsLab flipped our expectations for a tourism ad on its head and uses sarcasm to hilariously sell Oslo to the world. The work and companies honored this year have shown that there is no single magic bullet when it comes to utilizing culture, but you do have to know where to aim. 1. Liquid DeathFor giving the brand collab new life In a scene straight from the ’90s, two girls fawn over a heartthrob in a teen magazine. But instead of looking like Freddie Prinze Jr., the object of their affection is covered in Gene Simmons-style black-and white face paint. Suddenly, he materializes in the room holding a coffin-shaped, heavy-metal makeup kit from E.l.f. Cosmetics and water brand Liquid Death. Launched in March 2024, the ad hit 12 billion impressions in two weeks, and the limited-edition Corpse Paint sold out in less than 45 minutes. Founded by marketing veteran Mike Cessario, who copied the language of energy drinks while bringing his heavy-metal-themed water brand to life and has internalized the absurdities of commercial culture, the company spent 2024 using its collabs and other campaigns to spoof our culture’s entire relationship with advertising while still producing great creative. With ice cream brand Van Leeuwen, Liquid Death debuted a hot-fudge-sundae-flavored sparkling water last August that sold out in seven hours, cementing the questionable beverage as Amazon’s most successful limited-time grocery product. Alongside Depends, it launched the $75 Pit Diaper—a spiked pleather diaper made for moshing and avoiding dive-bar bathrooms. The product was a plug for Depends’ adult incontinence products, naturally. Being a strong collab partner has been good business. The company hit a record $333 million in sales in 2024, with a growth rate nine times the overall bottled water category. With its $1.4 billion valuation, the company is eyeing an IPO, retaining Goldman Sachs last summer to explore the possibility. Read more about Liquid Death, honored as No. 43 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025. 2. Superconnector StudiosFor pioneering a way to make brand work genuinely entertaining If you want to know what the future of brands infiltrating entertainment will look like, keep an eye on Superconnector Studios. Nearly two years since its 2023 launch, the company is is uniquely reshaping the relationship between brands and Hollywood. Last year, Superconnector worked with LVMH to create the luxury goods company’s new entertainment arm, 22 Montaigne, to explore content possibilities and Hollywood partnerships for its 70 brands. Now, it has 30 active film and television projects with A-list entertainment partners, such as Oscar-winning producer Stacey Sher, Imagine Entertainment, and Box to Box Films, across multiple LVMH brands, including Tiffany & Co., Hennessy, Dior, Moët & Chandon, Belmond, Marc Jacobs, Bulgari, and Sephora. Beyond LVMH, the company has been working with AB InBev’s Draftline Entertainment division, Box to Box Films (the studio behind Drive to Survive), Netflix, and Stella Artois on an upcoming sports documentary series focused on Wimbledon. The company has formalized its sports connections by launching Superconnector Sports, a division in partnership with 32-year Nike veteran and Nike’s longest-serving global CMO, and two-time Olympic athlete, Dirk-Jan “DJ” van Hameren. One person excited about the new sports division is Omaha Productions founder and NFL Hall of Famer Peyton Manning, who’s worked with Superconnector on a partnership between Bud Light and the next season of Omaha’s Netflix show Quarterback. “The team over at Superconnector has been great partners,” says Manning. “We’ve teamed up on several projects, and they’ve delivered on every single one. I’m excited to keep working together to help tell great sports stories.” 3. AirbnbFor turning iconic locations like the Roman Colosseum into epic marketing and a place to sleep Two years ago, Airbnb learned an important lesson when it rented out an IRL Barbie Dreamhouse, garnering twice as many impressions as the company’s IPO announcement: People get excited about iconic, unique locations tied to pop culture and history. That insight led to Airbnb launching a permanent feature called Icons. Combining experiential and brand partnership opportunities—such as giving people the opportunity to rent the house from Pixar’s Up or the X-Men mansion—it started in May with 11 experiences, with more added throughout the year. Each Icon opportunity has a countdown for when the listing goes live, and guests can request to book through the app. Guests are then picked from a drawing, and those picked get a digital golden ticket. Most Icons are free, and those that charge are priced under $100 per guest. All told, the company made 4,000 tickets available in 2024. More than a new product, Icons has fueled visitor growth for Airbnb. From May to September, there were nearly 57 million viewers of Icons on Airbnb’s site and more than 1 billion social impressions. It was also a major factor in the company registering 1.7 million new customer profiles between the Icons launch in May and the end of the year. 4. NewsLabFor completely and hilariously changing the vibe of what a tourism ad can be When it comes to tourism slogans, odds are that “I wouldn’t come here, to be honest” would rank pretty low among marketers, but it’s the line at the center of the tourism campaign for the Norwegian creative studio NewsLab. Launched in June 2024, the commercial follows Halfdan, an indifferent native Oslovian as he shows a camera crew around the city, questioning whether it is “even a city,” and lamenting the area’s walkability and beach access. He also finds fault in the city’s public amenities as he sullenly gazes out at beautiful landscapes. The ad quickly went viral for its dry humor and reverse psychology, which flipped the script on the often overproduced, and, frankly, corny approach that’s typical for American tourism spots. The result was more than 20 million views, global news coverage, and a complete vibe shift in what a tourism ad can be. And now we all know a bit more about Oslo than it being the hometown of Edvard Munch and A-ha. 5. Johannes LeonardoFor teaming with Anthony Edwards to put the swagger and fun back into basketball sneaker ads Ad agency Johannes Leonardo’s 2024 campaign for Adidas made one thing clear: the sportswear brand has a bona fide star on its hands with Minnesota Timberwolves player Anthony Edwards. Not only does he have the skills to be a future face of the NBA, he’s got a sense of humor, is a natural on camera, and talks just the right amount of trash. The campaign was strategically released only on Instagram in order to truly tap into the online communities of hoops fandom culture.The first spot had Edwards and his pal digging in a bag of other stars’ debut kicks—Ja Morant, Luka Dončić, and LeBron—and declaring the superiority of his own new shoe. In another spot, Edwards is shooting hoops while his pal reads out receipts of people criticizing him. Edwards reacts to real comments from legend Carmelo Anthony and rapper Cam’ron. Most brands shy away from controversy. But it’s exactly what Johannes Leonardo was going for. Stir the pot. Get people talking. What makes this campaign great is the brand and Edwards’s willingness to name names. Having Edwards respond to critics a day after being eliminated from the NBA playoffs was a bold move. But Johannes Leonardo and Adidas used the opportunity to remind everyone, as Ant says, that this is just the beginning. The work helped propel The AE 1 to be Foot Locker’s bestseller in 2024, generating 443 million impressions, and five sellout drops—without a dollar spent on traditional advertising media like TV ads. 6. McCann WorldgroupFor teaming up with Xbox to turn soccer gaming skills into an IRL job Football Manager is widely considered the most realistic game simulating what it’s like to manage a soccer team. So when it came to the launch of Football Manager 24, McCann had an incredibly ambitious idea for its Xbox client. If the game really was the closest thing to the real deal, why not make it that much closer? So McCann used the launch campaign to help the small English club Bromley FC recruit its next tactician from an untapped talent pool: gamers. The campaign invited gamers to apply for the job of a support performance tactician for the South London club. Eventually, 23-year-old Nathan Owolabi won the job, and his experience was chronicled in a three-part doc series called Everyday Tactician, which aired on TNT Sports in the U.K. Now, that would’ve been cool enough. But Owolabi used the data skills he honed while playing the game to help Bromley achieve its best season ever, getting promoted to League Two for the first time in its 132-year history. This is an incredible result. Global soccer is dominated by rich clubs that can afford to hire top coaches and analysts, so this campaign gave Bromley a massive boost. And for Microsoft, McCann’s work helped Football Manager 24 become the most-played edition in the history of the game franchise. 7. Wieden+KennedyFor helping to launch Caitlin Clark’s WNBA era Wieden+Kennedy continued to prove this past year that it knows how to help huge brands show up in big ways, in big moments. The agency in 2024 continued to flip the script on how McDonald’s shows up in culture by actually celebrating something that it didn’t create. For years, many famous manga books, anime films, and shows have featured references to “WcDonald’s,” a fictional chain with upside-down golden arches. W+K decided to collaborate with big names in anime and manga to re-create WcDonald’s IRL across more than 30 different markets with manga-inspired packaging, a special sauce, and anime episodes. A near perfect execution of a brand celebrating and collaborating over co-opting pop culture. The agency also helped McDonald’s ride an unexpected wave of newfound Grimace popularity. When Grimace threw the first pitch at a Mets game in June, it kicked off a seven-game win streak for the team, and a beautiful—and branded—relationship was born. As the team kept winning, W+K kept hyping the connection—across social media and IRL by turning the Empire State Building purple, and sending Grimace on the 7 train ahead of a playoff game. The Mets didn’t win the World Series, but the Grimace work got 9.6 billion impressions across social and earned media. For longtime client Nike, W+K effectively tapped into the incredible waves of hype surrounding Caitlin Clark’s final season of NCAA basketball. The “You Break It, You Own It” and “This Was Never a Long Shot” work around Caitlin Clark’s record-breaking college season generated more than 21 million impressions and views across Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. 8. SauconyFor replacing screen time with running time What does a running shoe brand have to do with the ongoing discussion around the impacts of screen time? This was a question Saucony answered with “the Marathumb Challenge.” It created the world’s first branded experience that measured the distance you scroll on your phone, and then compared it to the distance you move in real time. The goal was to gamify the idea of replacing at least some of your screen time with a run. Within the platform, users could track their daily and weekly progress, check out past wins, and motivate others by sharing completed challenges on their social media channels. Each week, if consumers moved their feet more than they scrolled through their feed, they were driven directly to the Saucony site and rewarded with exclusive swag. The risk of such a project is that it will come across less as a utility for a healthier life balance and more like a corporate scolding. But Saucony threaded the needle perfectly. Participants in the Marathumb Challenge collectively ran more than 739,431 miles, and the app boasted an impressive 75% retention rate, completely eclipsing the average of 35%. The entire effort garnered over 1 billion earned impressions, including more than $11 million in advertising value. 9. New York LibertyFor making its mascot the MVP of the marketing team She rocks the pregame tunnel, is one of the most popular members of the WNBA champion New York Liberty, and is widely considered one of the most marketable sports stars in the Big Apple. With apologies to Sabrina Ionescu, the real star has been a 10-foot pachyderm named Ellie. The Liberty increased the number of sponsors by more than 60% year over year this season, which just happens to coincide with the team’s mascot Ellie the Elephant becoming a key part of the team’s partnership marketing efforts for the first time. Since being introduced in 2021, Ellie has established herself as a key part of the WNBA franchise’s brand and business model. The Liberty have cultivated her as the ultimate sports celebrity—one that never ages, sells a lot of merch, never demands a trade, and never misses a shot. Her performances go far beyond the home-court crowd, with more than 150,000 Instagram followers and 178,000 on TikTok. Ellie is a distinct star in a sea of mascots, thanks to her celebrity styling and fashion sense. What other mascot wears Nikes and carries a Telfar bag? Vogue chronicled her getting ready for game two of the WNBA finals. That distinction has allowed the Liberty to not only unlock new sponsors but give them more ways to engage with fans. Ellie has been in the starting lineup for marketing campaigns for Xbox, Bumble, and Hero Cosmetics. 10. YetiFor crafting branded content that is also a stand-alone piece of art The accessories and gear brand has long produced short films that tell compelling stories tied to the outdoors, but last year it managed to evolve that genre in an inspiring way. It takes a careful eye to spot the brand opportunity in a 34-minute portrait of Jimmy Buffett and his group of friends in Key West, Florida, back in the late 1960s and ’70s. But with All That Is Sacred, directed by Scott Ballew, Yeti saw a spiritual connection between the people who use its gear in the outdoors and the shared fishing obsession of writers like Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, Guy de la Valdéne, and Richard Brautigan. The combination of interviews with those of the group still living, shot over the past few years, and footage from a little-seen 1973 doc called Tarpon, by de la Valdéne and Christian Odasso, is a magical portrait of a specific time and place. It’s also a clear evolution of Yeti’s ambitions with film as well as a signal that brands can push themselves artistically with the right amount of creative courage. Yeti produced the film and launched it for free on YouTube last July across its digital channels. When McGaune was asked what he thought of the film being produced and promoted by a brand, he said, “Given that it’s such a lovely piece of work, I hope it isn’t dismissed as a commercial.” No chance. 11. FCBFor racing the past versus the present with F1 and Michelob Ultra The key to any great brand partnership is to create work that people actually want to watch or experience. In April, FCB worked with Michelob Ultra and F1’s Williams Racing to create an incredibly unique sports TV special called Lap of Legends, the first-ever real-versus-virtual F1 race. Current F1 driver Logan Sargeant raced against the virtual avatars of Williams Racing legends like Mario Andretti, Alain Prost, and Jacques Villeneuve. The one-hour film used AR, AI machine learning and telemetry, as well as research from more than 720 races, 1,260 hours of footage, and 144,000 miles of racing to mimic the speed, style, technique, and strategy of the drivers and their cars. It was seen across 28 countries, scoring 4.5 billion impressions and 19 million views across all platforms. For FCB’s Michelob Ultra client, it boosted month-over-month growth in organic search by 1,650%, and 23% growth in month-over-month social reach. Meanwhile, for Dramamine the agency created “The Last Barf Bag,” a delightful short film about the airplane sickness bag through the perspectives of enthusiast collectors, offering a fun, kooky approach to an incredibly tough product category. 12. The Martin AgencyFor orchestrating distinct celebrity collabs, even for a pitchman as ubiquitous as Snoop It all started in late 2023, but continued well into last year. The social post heard ‘round the world, when Snoop Dogg announced he was giving up smoke, lit the internet on fire. For one of the planet’s most notorious weed smokers to even hint at giving it up was actually enough to get covered on the news. The agency’s work for Solo Stove smokeless fire pits eventually attracted 19.5 billion media impressions, more than 10,000 media placements across 68 countries, generating $100 million in earned media while boosting unaided brand awareness by 2.5 times. The brand saw a 500% spike in organic search, a 70% increase in revenue, a 20% higher average order value, a 22% reduction in customer acquisition costs, and its best four weeks of firepit sales. This was an epic pop-culture troll that managed to do two things: First, it found a unique way to utilize Snoop as a brand spokesperson, even though he is arguably the most overexposed celebrity in advertising. And second, it did it in a way that actually boosted results for the brand immediately, and in the long term. That wasn’t the Martin Agency’s only pop-culture play last year. The agency worked with Wyclef Jean for its client TIAA on a sponsored anthem on financial literacy for Black Americans. While it doesn’t immediately sound like fodder for a pop hit, the song was available on Amazon Music, and generated $100K in donations to First Generation Investors within a week, lifted TIAA’s brand awareness by 63%, and website visits by more than four times. 13. Nutter ButterFor making “unhinged” a long-term social brand strategy A cookie appears dripping over a playground that’s on fire, like a Salvador Dalí clock. A young woman asks, “Nutter Butter, are you guys okay?” and two Nutter Butter cookies with composite faces move up and down in tandem with a rainbow “Yes” dancing above them. This is the mystical universe of absurdist oddities and inside jokes that Mondelez International-owned Nutter Butter has crafted for itself across social since 2023, but really took off this past year. To the uninitiated, a visit to Nutter Butter TikTok may feel like The Annoying Orange made by a rogue marketer on acid. But at a time when many marketers are covered in fear-induced flop sweats over the potential to make a mistake or offend, the cookie brand’s calculated shift to the unhinged shows that a distinct vision and commitment to it can yield impressive results. The 10 videos posted to Nutter Butter’s TikTok page in September had more than 87 million views, and the brand more than doubled its follower count in 2024. The numbers also added up beyond social. According to Stackline, an AI-enabled retail intelligence and activation platform, Nutter Butter sales on Amazon alone grew as much as 190% in 2024. 14. TBWA\WorldwideFor harnessing AI tools to solve the needs of brands Last June, the global ad agency announced its CollectiveAI platform, a suite of tools that leverage its insights and lessons from more than 11,000 creative minds in over 40 countries. It’s not the only agency to develop in-house AI tools, but it is one of the most comprehensive and active over this past year. Featured in the suite is a tool that scales cultural research done through almost a decade of daily uploads. Brands can analyze certain cultural trends with a particular audience or product category, then generate ideas that can capitalize on that information. Another tool focuses on social media, trained on detailed case studies and data to provide pointed, expert solutions in research, strategy, and planning. It all sounds nice in theory, but TBWA has also been putting these tools into practice. For Moderna, the agency used these tools to build a Virtual Pharmacist to combat vaccine misinformation. For McDonald’s, it built a Fan Truth Bot trained on more than 15,000 guest experiences in 29 countries. The bot identifies themes, suggests variations on existing fan truths, and generates new ones, helping the agency see fans in more creative ways and discover new ideas faster. Speaking of creative new ideas, the agency also created scented billboards in the Netherlands that didn’t feature any outward branding except McDonald’s red and the distinct aroma of the chain’s famous french fries. 15. Uncommon Creative StudioFor grabbing New Yorkers’ attention—by putting rats under their feet Amid a fight for consumer attention, brand work can often veer into stunt products that don’t fit in with a company’s ethos or celebrity for celebrity’s sake. But Uncommon’s past year has seen it smartly deploy both tactics. Shortly after the London-based company opened its New York City office, it found a cunning way to capture locals’ attention and demonstrate its work. In February 2024, it put model and self-proclaimed rodent lover Jenny Assaf in its Ratboot—a custom pair of black leather knee-high boots, each with a taxidermied rat in the platform. Garnering more than 100 million views online in less than 48 hours, the boots went up for auction, with proceeds benefiting Mainly Rats Rescue, a nonprofit that finds homes for rehabilitated rats. Uncommon was equally creative in its work for clients. To celebrate mobile game developer Supercell’s first global launch in five years, Uncommon created a star-studded short film for the new game Squad Busters. Chris Hemsworth, Christina Ricci, Ken Jeong, Will Arnett, and Auli‘i Cravalho play game characters who follow one innocent man around his day, trying to convince him to join the game. At five minutes long, it risked resembling an overcooked SNL sketch. Instead, it’s a hilarious introduction to the game’s universe, while getting Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” stuck in your head. It also helped Squad Busters become the fastest-ever mobile game to reach 40 million preregistrations. The company’s work helped it grow its revenue 40% year over year in 2024. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Good agriculture has always been about caring for the land—but today, that responsibility is more critical than ever. Innovative agriculture companies must now dedicate significant energy to ensuring future generations of farmers can continue to grow healthy, bountiful crops and feed the planet. The most innovative companies in agriculture for 2025 include forward-thinking businesses and nonprofits with at least one eye firmly on this future. Zero Foodprint takes the top slot, for funding regenerative farming through a model so simple, it becomes radical: Restaurants, grocers, and food companies are asked to contribute 1% of consumer purchases to directly fund farm conversions. On the farm equipment front, Four Growers released a fruit-picking robot for vertical farms that’s 10 times faster than human labor, automatically packs produce, and provides accurate yield forecasts to boot. Applied Carbon introduced a compact, seemingly steampunk-inspired incinerator that transforms harvest debris into carbon-rich biochar in a single pass, spreading it back onto fields to boost crop yields. In the AI arena, Arable’s sophisticated analytics platform and award-winning sensor have attracted partnerships with tech giants like Google to help farmers cut water use and improve the health of some 65 crops in 50 countries. ClimateAi uses advanced computer-learning models—akin to those in self-driving cars—to give farmers and major food manufacturers hyper-detailed forecasts, guiding decisions on when and where to plant specific crops. For biotech, Moolec Science achieved not one but three USDA approvals for the first crops that grow meat proteins, producing pork-infused soybeans, beef-enriched peas, and more. Pairwise made history with the world’s first CRISPR-edited food—a milder mustard green—and the first seedless blackberry. Addressing agriculture’s labor challenges, Seso offers software now used by one-third of America’s 100 largest agricultural employers to streamline the H-2A visa process for migrant farmworkers—a workforce the industry relies on heavily, at a time when it’s become a cultural flashpoint. Meanwhile, beverage giant Diageo expanded regenerative farming in Ireland for Guinness’s barley, Scotland for whisky grains, and Mexico for the agave used to produce its tequilas. And organic-farming pioneer the Rodale Institute has trained educational prowess on promoting regenerative farming in places where it can make a significant impact—like Ventura County, California, where in the past year it partnered with Patagonia to transition farmers to more sustainable methods. 1. Zero FoodprintFor funding “collective regeneration” Launched in 2020 by chef Anthony Myint and his wife Karen Leibowitz as platform to help restaurants go carbon neutral, Zero Foodprint today is advancing perhaps the most promising pathway to making regenerative farming the standard in America. Restaurants were initially encouraged to offset a portion of their emissions by donating 1% of sales to carbon farming. When the idea took off, ZFP ran with it—leading to a James Beard Award and Basque Culinary World Prize-winning nonprofit that’s partnered with Chez Panisse, Noma, Subway, and 100 other restaurants, enlisted prominent winemakers, and funded $19 million in regenerative farming projects, sequestering more than 100,000 tons of CO2e. This year, ZFP added its first grocery partner (New Seasons Market); recruited Bob’s Red Mill, Vital Farms, Tillamook County Creamery, and Stumptown Coffee as new backers; and made its boldest pitch yet, via a TED Talk, for scaling the “collective regeneration” model. Next up is utilities: It has helped draft a Washington State bill to earmark 1% of restaurant bills and $1 from trash bills statewide for regenerative ag projects. If scaled nationwide, this opt-out model could turn food and utility consumers into a vast revenue base. Unlike typical sustainability program funders and carbon credit firms that just move money around, ZFP collects funds directly and deploys them on projects it manages like a general contractor, ensuring their legitimacy. Myint’s TED Talk argued that the solution to sustainable farming is already before us, just overlooked. America has spent billions championing organic farming, but consumers don’t back agricultural change when they buy end products; fewer than 1% of today’s farms are certified organic. ZFP argues that because surveys show that consumers are eager to fund sustainable solutions, shifting the burden and scaling the 1% program through collective action is the answer. 2. Climate AiFor predicting the future for nine key commodity crops In the summer of 2024, ClimateAi unveiled forecasts that it promised could predict the weather for anywhere from one hour to six months in advance. Founded by Himanshu Gupta—an energy policy expert who advised Vice President Al Gore and helped draft the Paris Agreement—the six-year-old startup helps farmers to be ready to respond to weather changes as rapidly as they’re occurring nowadays. Its offers satellite imagery, temperature and rainfall readings, and a breakthrough use of physics-driven AI—the same technology used by self-driving cars. Together, this mix creates extremely accurate detailed forecasts and also tells farmers when to plant which crops where, even predicting their likely yields. ClimateAi’s software is equally sought by large companies. It claims more than 20 major food and drink brands are clients, from Japanese beverage giant Suntory to potato supplier McCain Foods to pistachio producer Wonderful Company and its wine subsidiary, Justin Vineyards. McCain recruited ClimateAi in 2023, once the spud grower began worrying in earnest if it will have a viable potato business in 10 years. ClimateAi now assesses crop risks for McCain’s various growing regions, then hands off high-level recommendations for the best practices to maintain current yields. Adjustments like these take time, sometimes decades, and Gupta has warned that companies hoping to make changes to stay climate-resilient are “running against time.” 3. PairwiseFor growing the world’s first CRISPR food Pairwise combines two concepts few humans would dare to fuse: food and CRISPR, the gene-editing technology known for designer babies and attempts to resurrect the woolly mammoth. The startup has built a system to select more desirable and nutritious crop traits. It then partners with major shakers in agriculture, everyone from Corteva to the USDA, in hopes of introducing them on grocery aisles. This past year, Pairwise and Bayer began working to scale leafy greens that are officially North America’s first “CRISPR food”—mustard greens whose wasabi-like pungency has been dialed down, making for a palatable new leafy greens option that packs twice the nutrition of romaine. Then in June, it rolled out the world’s first seedless blackberry, making use of something dubbed the Fulcrum Platform. This proprietary genetics technology was able to eliminate the hard pits surrounding a blackberry’s seeds, as well as the thorns that bedevil growers. Pairwise claims these seedless berries offer better flavor, are more consistent berry to berry, and have great market potential, similar to that of seedless grapes and watermelons. It contends that the breakthrough here equips it to do the same trick with new fruits, leading to possible produce section goldmines like pitless cherries. 4. Rodale InstituteFor leveraging its decades of knowledge in organic and regenerative farming to bring more farmers and consumers aboard The Rodale Institute is where the modern organic movement was born. For the past seven decades, it has been leading educational efforts to disseminate specific farming techniques. Rodale’s skill at inventing creative ways to win over stubborn farmers is now coming in handy as it furthers the burgeoning new cause of regenerative agriculture. This past year, its team of scientists and academics have worked on initiatives with 24 partners across America, putting some 41,000 conventional acres in transition to regenerative. It is on the ground with Patagonia in California, working to convert farms to regenerative in Ventura County, one of the world’s worst places for pesticide use and an area now plagued by respiratory problems, poor air quality, and other health issues. It also collaborated with tree startup Propagate to help more farmers see the prospects of agroforestry as less daunting. It even spent part of last year boosting organic hazelnut farming in Pennsylvania—hazelnuts currently grow almost exclusively in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. These projects come alongside others in recent years that Rodale says have involved helping major food companies from General Mills to Cargill and Bell & Evans adapt their supply chains to regenerative organic practices. 5. DiageoFor using Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Casamigos, and other spirits to lift the planet’s own As a brand that controls a disproportionate swath of the world’s grain supply because it is behind many of its biggest alcohol brands, Diageo has taken it upon itself to scale regenerative farming in three key growing regions: Ireland for Guinness’s barley, Scotland for whisky grains, and Mexico for agave used to produce its tequilas. The Guinness program is in its third year, but it has swelled to where it now involves 44 growers focused on enhancing soil health, reducing fertilizer use, and improving water quality. Data from the past year shows cover crops today encompass 1,400 hectares in a prime barley-growing area of southeast Ireland, leading to greater biodiversity, more pollinators and birdlife, improved soil fertility, and water retention. Last October, Diageo announced that these regenerative practices would expand across Ireland into farms that grow barley and wheat for Johnnie Walker, Talisker, and the Singleton whiskies, and it would also begin looking at the agave that impacts its top tequila brands like Don Julio, Casamigos, DeLeón, and Astral. Success in Mexico would require working closely with local agave producers, the company added, since it would need their decades of experience to understand how the plant could hold carbon for a six- to seven-year growth cycle. 6. ArableFor replenishing water in Nebraska Arable joins the umpteen other startups that in recent years have launched sophisticated analytics platforms to track weather risk and crop health. What makes Arable stand out is that its platform is showing impressive results, particularly for water reduction, that are drawing industry accolades. Now active in tracking 65 different crops in more than 50 countries, the company claims to process 28 billion datapoints every month. This, Arable says, allows it to custom-tailor farming down to the individual field or hyperlocal weather level. Among 2024’s highlights was a project with Bayer that addressed water scarcity in key basins in Mexico by giving farmers an award-winning new sensor, the Mark 3, to track and then tweak their own irrigation practices. Arable reports that the project is on pace to cut water use by more than half a billion gallons—an amount almost equal to the daily consumption of 2 million U.S. households. Through a collaboration with the nonprofit TomorrowNow, the same device equipped smallholder farmers in Africa with next-generation climate data, and Arable says the Mark 3 also played a key role in a project with Shell to estimate potential carbon credits in Brazil. A collaboration closer to home, this one with Google, put Arable in action on 25,000 acres in Nebraska to help farmers fight a bad drought while also clocking significant reductions in electricity and diesel usage. A trendsetting local farmer, Roric Paulman, whose farm has hosted modern agricultural initiatives like one in 2019 from IBM’s Watson, later called it “the most revolutionary step I’ve seen irrigation take,” explaining that Arable helped to reduce his water usage by 22% across 27 fields. 7. SesoFor helping farm workers work America has quintupled annual H-2A visas for migrant farmworkers since the mid-2010s—from 50,000 to over 250,000—yet finding labor has only gotten harder for the agriculture industry. Despite the H-2A’s lack of a numerical cap, each year visa application hang-ups cost the industry billions in rotted crops by delaying workers’ arrival. With a new administration prioritizing deportations, employers face mounting pressure to find foreign-born workers (70% of the workforce) and also secure them safe, legally protected jobs. Seso argues that it solves both problems. Started by founders with families who operate farms, Seso acts as hiring agency with recruitment offices in Latin America, then it shifts into the role of immigration consultant and document preparer for the visa application process. Seso started in 2019 by “cold-calling the smallest farms in America, offering to do their visas for free,” says CEO Michael Guirguis, but it’s now on a tea. It closed on $26 million of Series B funding in April led by Bond’s Mary Meeker and doubled revenue in 2024, allowing it to grow into the country’s second-largest farmworker visa agency and claim a third of America’s 100 largest ag employers as clients. Services have grown, too, to include automating payroll and insurance in back offices, lobbying Washington to address the federal immigration backlog, and sharpening relationships with stakeholder governments in Mexico and Central America. It also has a new product planned that will help farmworkers—an estimated half of whom are unbanked—set up checking and savings accounts, complete with a Spanish-speaking support center Seso has built from scratch. 8. Four GrowersFor saving the (vertical) farm Last year was not vertical farming’s best. Several top players bit the dust or went bankrupt (Bowery Farming, AeroFarms, Smallhold) after disclosing that they were struggling to scale. However, a new robot agtech startup called Four Growers has emerged that could perhaps turn a leaf for the industry: Its flagship GR-100 harvests produce grown in vertical farms. But the pitch isn’t that it’s another cool robot that picks fruit up to 10 times faster than humans; rather, it’s machinery that more fundamentally reimagines vertical farming operations. It adapts to the farm, can pack the fruit it picks, and has sophisticated-enough AI built in to deliver accurate yield forecasts to growers. Four Growers designed similar robotics for large farms on spec, like Nature Fresh, an organic tomato and berry brand available at Whole Foods, as recently as 2022. The GR-100 has picked up five large farm clients in the past year and a half. It now has a version ready for wider retail launch that is currently being demoed. The bot is equipped with four stereo cameras to help navigate complex greenhouse environments and also predict when unripe fruits will be ready. It harvests in a way that essentially packs by default, picking 24 crates’ worth of tomatoes at a time, and sorting them by weight with a weighted elevator system as it moves. Right now, the bots can also harvest cucumbers and peppers, but supposedly the “whole salad” is in the works. 9. Applied CarbonFor taking biochar production directly into the field While other agtech companies are building elaborate futuristic machines that are still working to prove their value in sucking carbon from the air, a startup called Applied Carbon is using a small incinerator to leverage a centuries-old agricultural practice that scientists believe could sequester 2 gigatons of carbon a year while also boosting crop yields. Its pyrolyzer might sound like it was hauled straight from a Victorian inventor’s workshop, but the device is cutting-edge: In a single pass, a procession of interlinked tractors collect debris from the harvest and transform it into carbon-rich biochar that gets spread back onto the field, enriching the soil and reducing the need for fertilizers. Biochar’s ability to improve soil health traces back to ancient Amazonian practices, when it helped to create that region’s fertile black soil. It has the capacity to store carbon for centuries, but scaling it is a real challenge, particularly moving agricultural waste to a biochar facility and the resulting biochar back to the farm. Applied Carbon solves the transportation problem by bringing the generator to the farm. Its current model can handle corn, rice, peanut, and cotton. The waste is chopped up, fed into a reactor that blasts the material at 1,000 degrees, then mixed into the field after being doused in water to cool it off. A syngas is also produced that cleverly powers the equipment itself. In July 2024, Applied Carbon announced that it had raised $22 million in funding to deploy its machines across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Companies including Microsoft are already signed up to purchase the carbon offsets generated by the process. 10. Moolec ScienceFor inserting animal genes into plants, for better nutrition Moolec Science is helping plants to taste like meat by rewriting the instructions they follow to build their own proteins—yielding, so far, a pork-infused soy called PiggySooy and a pea that was spliced together with bovine DNA. Both products are USDA-approved, and suffice it to say, they push the boundaries of what people picture when they hear the words “molecular farming.” Detractors, of course, will argue that these mutant plants are GMO central and demand to know whether such reengineered crops that blur the line between plant and animal serve any real-world utility. Moolec says the answer is a much firmer “yes” than most people realize—that not only do they have the potential to improve the nutritional benefits, color, and sensory experience of plant-based proteins, they can produce literal animal proteins that are cheaper, Earth-friendlier, and more humane, and even boring old vegetable oils that are more nutrient-packed and functional. The company secured three landmark USDA approvals in the past year, including the world’s first for a pea enriched with cow iron, the pig soybean, and a safflower with the highest omega-6 fatty acid concentration on the planet—making it resemble a fish in this regard more than a thistly plant. Moolec reported earning $6 million in revenue for 2024, roughly a sixfold leap for the year, driven primarily by early sales of Piggy Sooy. The fish oil safflower is headed to market “imminently,” it says. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

It’s been gradual, but generative AI models and the apps they power have begun to measurably deliver returns for businesses. Organizations across many industries believe their employees are more productive and efficient with AI tools such as chatbots and coding assistants at their side. Numerous AI startups found traction offering such solutions during 2024. Glean, for example, puts cutting-edge AI search capabilities in the hands of employees so that they can tap into various apps and platforms to find documents and corporate intelligence. Contextual AI lets organizations put a company’s proprietary intelligence into a secure data store, then lets them build AI apps that can call on that data. Enterprises are also using AI apps to protect softer corporate assets, such as reputation. Blackbird.AI offers a web app that enterprises use to monitor how their brand name is portrayed in social media posts, videos, links, and memes. Other standout AI apps focuse on specific industries. Google DeepMind put drug discovery ahead by years when it improved on its AlphaFold model, which now can model and predict the behaviors of proteins and other actors within the cell. Harvey has found its legs within the legal industry by offering an AI legal assistant that can write briefs, summarize and compare cases, and more. Coding assistants grew considerably–both in capability and usage–during 2024. Anysphere’s Cursor tool, for example, helped advance the genre from simply completing lines or sections of code to building whole software functions based on the plain language input of a human developer. 1. GleanFor arming employees with the tools to get their jobs done Companies contain a lot of information that’s crucial for employees to know, but it’s spread out across an array of workplace apps: Slack, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and more. Five-year-old Glean offers a user-friendly AI-powered search tool that allows employees to find information and generate answers across more than 100 data sources. In June 2024, the company transformed its existing enterprise AI assistant and search engine into a platform called Work AI platform. It allows employees of all technical backgrounds to quickly generate personalized, accurate answers—and even create their own no-code tools to make the agents work better for the specifics of their jobs and businesses. The Work AI suite also includes a Glean Actions tool, which enables the AI assistant to directly take action on an employee’s behalf within a company’s connected applications. Actions could involve reading data from an application and executing a specific task, creating Jira tickets, publishing new content, or searching for code. In September, Glean doubled down on its user-friendly proposition by making it even easier for non-technical employees to get the most from its tools with next-generation prompting features. These features include a Prompt Builder feature, which allows users to create their own directives for the AI assistant, and a Prompt Library, which includes suggested prompts from Glean, as well ones that a company has shared in its own prompt library. According to a November 2024 report in The Information, Glean was generating around $100 million in annual recurring revenue, more than tripling that metric over the past year. The company closed two funding rounds in 2024: $200 million in February and $260 million in September at a $4.6 billion valuation. Its 200+ customers include Reddit, Instacart, Pinterest, Duolingo, and Databricks. Read more about Glean, honored as No. 6 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025. 2. AnysphereFor giving developers a coding partner with contextual awareness Cursor AI has emerged as a standout in the growing field of AI code editors. The company behind it, Anysphere, made the smart design choice of building the UX based on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code, a familiar programming environment. Cursor also can access a developer’s or company’s existing code base as a way of fine-tuning code suggestions. Cursor acts like a coding partner that’s aware of the context in which code is being created. It offers code auto-completions, and not just of single lines–it can generate entire sections of code, and then explain the reasoning behind them. Or the developer can explain a new feature or function in plain language and the AI will code a prototype of it. Anysphere says Cursor now has more than 40,000 customers. Developers in online forums say that after using Cursor, they can’t go back to GitHub Copilot. In August, the startup raised a $60 million A round at a $400 million valuation from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Google’s Jeff Dean, OpenAI’s Noam Brown, and the founders of Stripe, GitHub, Ramp, and Perplexity. Four months later it raised a Series B round that closed in January 2025 with $105 million invested, raising its valuation to $2.6 billion. Read more about Anysphere, honored as No. 26 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025. 3. Blackbird.AIFor arming NATO and others with AI that detects AI disinformation Businesses and other organizations must constantly be aware of how their name is being used in the digital environment, and be able to react quickly if their brand and reputation are distorted by misinformation or disinformation. In 2024 Blackbird.AI released its Compass platform, which lets individual users reality check or get greater context around suspicious claims made in social media posts, videos, links, or memes. The user pastes the content into the Compass tool, which checks it against thousands of trustworthy online sources. In October 2024 Blackbird.AI launched “Compass Vision,” a new AI-based tool for identifying AI deepfake images and videos. Customers can access Compass Vision directly through Blackbird.AI’s platform, or they can use its API to integrate it with their existing threat intelligence and social listening systems. As companies continue to more aggressively protect their market value and brand equity in the digital space, the market for “narrative intelligence” services is likely to grow to as much as $70 billion annually, Blackbird.AI believes. The company has already positioned itself well, and expects its revenues to double or triple over the next year. Blackbird.AI has raised more than $20 million in venture capital so far. 4. Google DeepMindFor unfolding the mysteries of structural biochemistry Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and director of research John Jumper won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their parts in discovering and developing the AlphaFold AI models, which can predict the complex structures of virtually all known proteins. Proteins control and drive all chemical reactions within the bodies of organisms, including humans, so the tool is of great interest to researchers in drug development, material science, and environmental science. In 2024 DeepMind expanded its AlphaFold AI system to model how proteins interact with other cell structures, including DNA, RNA, and small molecules that are often used in drugs. The new system, called AlphaFold 3, can model the ways in which proteins “read” our DNA and then carry out the instructions in the body. It lets drug researchers quickly model how new drug compounds might react with certain receptor sites in the body, which could accelerate the exploratory phase of drug development. Traditionally this work has been done experimentally, in a wet lab. Google DeepMind developed AlphaFold 3 in collaboration with London-based Isomorphic Labs, an AI-based drug discovery lab it spun out into an independent unit within Google parent company Alphabet. Isomorphic is now working with Novartis and Eli Lilly. While drugs based on AlphaFold’s breakthroughs are yet to come, it’s already instigated a revolution in structural biochemistry. 5. DeepLFor translating everyday business communications into 33 languages, including traditional Chinese and Arabic Fast and accurate translation are crucial for multinational corporations, and generative AI has been a natural complement to existing services. One service provider, DeepL, has emerged as a standout for the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of its AI. The company already serves more than 150,000 businesses, governments, and other organizations across the legal, tech, media, manufacturing, and retail industries, including known names such as Nikkei, Panasonic Connect, Zendesk, and Morningstar. In November 2024 the company released DeepL Voice for Meetings, which lets participants speak in their preferred language during meetings and video calls, with real-time captions of others’ comments in their chosen language. DeepL Voice for Conversations does the same thing, but for one-on-one conversations happening on mobile devices. In July 2024, DeepL deployed a new large language model of its own, which its says significantly outperforms LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft for translation. DeepL also added Traditional Chinese and Arabic languages to its platform, bringing total supported languages to 33. Beyond translation, DeepL launched a new tool called DeepL Write, designed to help professionals improve their business writing skills. In May 2024 DeepL raised a $300 million funding round and saw its valuation rise to $2 billion–doubling its valuation after its previous funding round a year earlier. 6. PerplexityFor turning generative AI into a rival to traditional search, especially for election coverage Perplexity is one of the biggest success stories of the current AI boom. Its “answer engine” has revitalized web search, using a combination of homegrown large language models (LLMs), third-party models (from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and others) and web crawlers to return custom answers that are highly relevant and fastidiously cited. The San Francisco-based company saw its user base grow throughout 2024, as it added new features and functions to its platform. Perplexity began experimenting with ads and referrals on its platform late in 2024, and launched “Shop like a Pro”, an AI-powered shopping assistant that lets users research and even purchase products within Perplexity. Users of the Perplexity mobile app users can even snap pictures of items to see related products and buying information. Perplexity’s most surprising creation during 2024 may have been the AI-powered Election Information Hub it launched before the November 2024 U.S. elections. The hub offered voters real-time updates, candidate information, and ballot measure summaries, along with AI-generated analysis based on reliable data from The Associated Press and Democracy Works. Perplexity’s clear, verifiable approach to election coverage gained significant attention during the run-up to the elections. 7. Contextual AIFor making the next generation of AI more accurate and efficient To avoid hallucinations and keep answers on point, AI developers use what’s called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where large language models are fed relevant information used to respond to specific queries. Cofounded by CEO Douwe Kiela, who pioneered RAG while at Meta, Contextual AI emerged from stealth mode in June 2023 with a mission to use the power of RAG to build more accurate LLMs for enterprises. In March 2024, the company introduced RAG 2.0, a system that trains LLMs and the RAG ystem together, resulting in Contextual Language Models that are tuned for specific purposes for which they outperform leading commercial and open source models. Contextual also worked with the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to develop OLMoE, an AI system introduced in September that uses an approach called “mixture of experts,” in which a specialized subsection of the model is called on to answer a given question, leaving most of the other model parameters at rest. This can increase a model’s accuracy while making it faster and more energy efficient. Contextual, which counts HSBC, Qualcomm and The Economist as customers, announced in August 2024 that it raised an $80 million Series A round to fund further development of its enterprise-grade AI systems. 8. HarveyFor giving lawyers a trustworthy AI agent Using large language models in legal work has long been a tantalizing possibility. But fears over inaccuracies due to AI hallucinations have caused the legal field to move slowly in their adoption of them. Harvey has managed some real innovations aimed at making its AI legal assistant more reliable and transparent about its work. The Harvey Assistant can read and analyze cases and other data faster than a human lawyer or legal assistant, and can draft documents, analyze information, and answer questions about hundreds of complex legal files. Harvey gave the Assistant some important upgrades in August 2024. It added a series of specialized modes tailored to different kinds of legal work, it trained its AI to refine and expand on its initial responses, and it improved the system’s outputs and processing speed. Harvey says the new version of Assistant reduces AI hallucinations by 60% and improves the accuracy of cited sources by 23%. In a move to demystify the way the assistant comes up with its answers, Harvey released a report called “BigLaw Bench” describing its model training and evaluation methodologies. The company more than tripled its employees during 2024, and added more than 100 new customers in 15 countries. With a new $100 million funding round in July 2024, the company saw its valuation rise to $1.5 billion. 9. Khan AcademyFor empowering students and their teachers with a free AI writing coach In 2023, Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, an experimental AI tutor designed to give students one-on-one help in tasks such as practicing math problems, brainstorming project ideas, and analyzing literature. Since then, thousands of students and teachers have started using the tool, and Khan Academy has been busy adding new tools and features to the platform. During 2024, the non-profit built some important new functionality into its Khanamigo Writing Coach, which had originally been designed to act as a writing tutor for students. The tool now helps teachers, too, giving them access to detailed reports on student progress. It generates high-level insights on the writing challenges of individual students, and even helps teachers identify difficulties that multiple students in the class are facing. All this addresses a real challenge in English education–the time constraints teachers face when providing feedback on writing. Khan Academy cites a real-life example of a teacher with 100 students who typically needed 17 hours to review the first drafts of a two-page essay assignment, assuming the teacher spent 10 minutes on each paper. In an era when AI offers to do our writing for us, Khanamigo Writing Coach is instead focused on helping students break through barriers to effective written communication—and on helping teachers guide them along the way. 10. SpeakFor supercharging English-language learning with live conversational roleplays Speak’s AI English tutor app, which is widely used in Korea and Japan, has been around for years. But the company took a big step forward during 2024 with a little help from OpenAI. The app already offered an English tutor that could teach and converse, but the conversations felt slow and unnatural. That’s because Speak’s system had to transcribe the user’s speech, run it through a text-based LLM workflow, then synthesize the AI character’s speech. Each of these steps created gaps and errors in the back-and-forth, which was disruptive to the learning process. Then Speak became one of the first companies to get access to OpenAI’s Realtime API, using it to power its “Live Roleplays” feature. The Realtime API is unique in that it’s powered by AI that treats both text and voice in the same way–as common tokens within a multi-modal model. So no conversions are necessary, making the model’s response time super-fast. As a result, Speak’s tutor can generate its voice responses with almost no delay. This makes exchanges between student and AI tutor feel much more fluid and natural. And that’s very important, because the best and fastest way to learn another language is through real life conversations. Speak may not be exactly real-life, but with OpenAI’s help it’s a lot closer to real-time. 11. PikaFor making a state-of-the-art video generator that’s accessible to nonprofessionals Pika’s founders, Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, dropped out of Stanford’s artificial intelligence PhD program in 2023 to pursue a big idea. The world needed a world-class video generation app that was designed for regular people–not just professional creators, film-makers and AI early adopters. The duo and their new company got the attention of the AI industry with the release of the second version of their model, Pika 1.5, and the accompanying app, in September 2024. People soon began pumping out videos using the app’s motion control and effects such as Pikaffects, with which users can melt, inflate, crush, squish or explode pretty much anything. This unleashed a wave of videos that were perfect for social media sites like TikTok. In December 2024, the company dropped its Pika 2.0 model, which introduced the ability to dress up videos with people, objects, and places from photos they upload to the app. Just a month later, it launched its 2.1 model, which added an Advanced Motion Control feature, which made animation or high-motion video more fluid and natural-looking. Pika is still a very young company, but it’s already taken a place in the top tier of AI video generators, along with OpenAI’s Sora, Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha, and Google’s Veo. 12. CanvaFor bringing Gen AI design to the largest organizations Canva has the most popular app in the design and creative category, with more than 100 million downloads in the Google Play store alone. The company has been busily adding AI features to its app, and many of its users are embracing them. In 2024, Canva continued expanding its Magic Studio suite of AI tools. The suite, which is aimed at designers within organizations big and small, now includes 12 native AI products built on proprietary models from Canva and its partners, including OpenAI, Google and Runway. They include a “text to graphic” generation tool, AI photo editing, and a feature that assembles a highlight reel of the best clips from a longer video. Canva also strengthened its AI hand in 2024 by acquiring Leonardo.Ai, a generative AI platform specializing in image and video that’s used by 19 million creatives globally. Canva was quick to begin powering its own new features using Leonardo’s powerful Phoenix foundation model, starting with the new Dream Lab image generator it launched in October. Canva did meet with some backlash when it raised the prices of its Teams plans because of the new AI features. Still, Canva it says its growth has continued to accelerate, reaching 220 million monthly active users by year-end, the last 20 million of those added in the fourth quarter alone. 13. SalesforceFor letting customers design no-code AI agents that can handle customer service, marketing, and more Salesforce moved rapidly to embrace AI agents during 2024, pivoting from its former “Einstein” AI platform to Agentforce, a new platform that lets Salesforce customers design their own no-code agents to handle customer service, sales, marketing, scheduling and other tasks. Agents go beyond chatbots by being able to perform work-related tasks without the constant supervision of humans. They can, for example, analyze data, make decisions, and work through tasks step by step on the user’s behalf. For example, Salesforce offers an agent called Sales Development Representative (SDR) that can engage with sales prospects at any time of the day, answer questions, schedule sales meetings, and even manage objections. In the second half of 2024 Salesforce released two major versions of the Agentforce platform. The vision is big—agents could be as significant a shift for business software as the move to the cloud 25 years ago—and while it’s still early, the first adopters of the technology include some big names, such as Disney, OpenTable, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Wiley. On an early December earnings call, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said his company is “unleashing this new era of digital labor for every business and industry.” He added that even though the Agentforce platform had only been available since late October, his company had already “signed 200 deals” to give companies access. 14. OsmoFor teaching AI how to smell The startup Osmo, which was spun out of Google Research in 2022, has developed a way of giving AI the sense of smell. The company–which is backed by Google Ventures, Lux Capital, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation–developed an AI system that can identify and recreate odors. It uses a number of sensitive sensors to detect molecules in the air that create odors, then feeds the sensor data to its AI models, which can represent the molecules digitally, as tokens within a neural network. The system can also create totally new scents, such as might be used in perfumes. Beyond the obvious application in the fragrance industry, Osmo has already tested its system for the detection of counterfeit goods, which usually have a very different olfactory signature than legit products. From July through September of 2024, Osmo deployed its system of sensors and models for four weeks at a fulfillment center for an online marketplace, where it gave hundreds of boxes of shoes the smell test. In the end Osmo proved there to be a measurable smell difference between authentic and counterfeit shoes, and that its system can ID the fakes quickly and accurately. It’s likely that many meaningful applications for Osmo’s AI haven’t yet been realized, such as in security work, disease detection or–you guessed it–Smell-o-vision. 15. EvolutionaryScaleFor applying AI to design new proteins that the world needs EvolutionaryScale is an AI company that develops advanced artificial intelligence models for biological research, particularly focusing on proteins. The company’s main product is ESM3, an generative AI model for biology that can reason over the sequence, structure, and function of proteins. ESM3 can be used to generate new protein designs that would take millions of years to evolve in nature, and that can be realized through synthetic biology methods, the company says. Such proteins could be useful in environmental science and materials science. In 2024 ESM3 generated a new Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), a type of protein responsible for the glowing effect seen in jellyfish and the vibrant fluorescent colors of coral. As a result of its unique properties, GFP has become an important tool in molecular biology, helping scientists to see molecules inside cells. EvolutionaryScale also published a paper in Nature that detailed how a team of scientists utilized a variant model called ESMFold to unveil deep and distant evolutionary relationships within the flavivirus family, which includes viruses such as hepatitis C, dengue, and Zika. In 2024 the company raised a $142 million round from noted AI investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, along with Lux Capital, Amazon, and Nvidiz’s venture capital arm, and others. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Architecture is, at its core, about problem-solving: balancing aesthetics, functional needs, and technical constraints to create effective buildings and environments. The most innovative firms in the industry expand this notion, solving pressing issues in new ways that build on or scale up existing techniques and technologies. Los Angeles-based Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, for instance, has advanced the concept of shipping container architecture, ushering it into the realm of sustainable neighborhood development. The firm’s Isla Intersections project in South Los Angeles closed a nearby street (a rarity in car-focused L.A.) to create an active “paseo,” which hosts local farmers markets and other gatherings. Its staggered form, lined with outdoor bridges, terraces, and planted gardens, seamlessly combines multiple buildings and creates a unique setting for community that is nonetheless protected from nearby congestion. Seattle-based NBBJ partnered with North Carolina healthcare provider Atrium Health to expand the niche field of prefabrication, creating the largest prefab healthcare construction in the United States. Using factory-built units, like facades, bathroom pods, patient rooms, and mechanical systems, the effort has thus far saved $100 million in construction costs and 20% to 50% in construction time. Global firm DLR Group significantly broadened the scope of adaptive reuse—the practice of repurposing existing buildings for new uses—finding new lives for buildings like department stores, hospitals, libraries, and even jails. And New York-based ODA found new life for a former parking garage in Buenos Aires, converting it into a mixed-use office building featuring planted walkways that connect directly to a nearby park. Not all advances in architecture involve physical buildings. Software giant Autodesk created Total Carbon Analysis for Architects, a digital tool that makes the evaluation of embodied and operational carbon far simpler and more intuitive than it had been for most designers. And Gensler rolled out its Product Sustainability Standards, providing for many in the industry a clear way to measure the carbon impact of the interior products they select. Innovation doesn’t have to mean reinventing the wheel: Often it just means making it better, more relevant, and a lot easier to use. 1. Lorcan O’Herlihy ArchitectsFor turning an “unbuildable” site into a home for the formerly homeless In 2024, Los Angeles-based Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA) created a new building on a parcel of land that had long been considered unbuildable. Isla Intersections, a supportive housing development for formerly homeless tenants, is built on a triangle of land right under L.A.’s massive 110-105 Freeway intersection. The development is designed as a vertical village of sorts, with 54 rooms (maximum capacity 112 people) created out of dozens of retrofitted shipping containers. The building’s staggered profile lessens its overall bulk and provides a sense of privacy, particularly along its interior courtyard, while still connecting to the outside world. A key element of the design is its green “paseo,” located on a former adjacent roadway, which hosts a weekly farmers market. This and a series of rooftop patios and edible gardens—irrigated by a system that reuses water from the building’s sinks, baths, and washing machines—create a much more pleasant living experience, provide fresh food, and improve the overall neighborhood. The project’s ground floor retail, reserved for local businesses, is designed to further activate the area. The city of Los Angeles is looking to sell more than 1,500 similar parcels to affordable housing developers in the coming years, and Isla provides a case study for how to do this efficiently and with beauty in mind. 2. Kadre ArchitectsFor transforming emergency housing into a joyful place to live Across Southern California, Kadre Architects is transforming rundown motels into striking transitional housing. Part of California’s emergency housing initiative, Project Homekey, the firm recently completed three housing developments that show how transitional housing can prioritize joy and livability. Collaborating with local housing nonprofit Hope, the Mission, Kadre created Alvarado Tiny Homes Village (Los Angeles, 2022, 45 units), the Woodlands (Woodland Hills, 2023, 43 units), and the Sierras (Lancaster, 2024, 38 units). The architects enlivened the banal facilities and their bleak surface parking lots with striking graphics, bright colors, and humane architectural and landscape interventions like screens, porches, indoor/outdoor spaces, plantings, and courtyards. Just as significant, the projects were completed in as little as nine months from start to finish, thanks to Kadre’s management of both design and construction and its extensive experience managing codes and permitting. Kadre also made each project energy efficient via PV panels, shade structures, electric water heaters, permeable surfaces, underground infiltration basins, and more. The firm has been commissioned to work on eight additional Project Homekey sites throughout Los Angeles County, totaling more than 470 units of interim and permanent housing. Some of the projects will also add new community buildings, and all are aiming for net zero energy use. 3. NBBJFor bringing scalable and stylish prefab architecture to healthcare Seattle architecture giant NBBJ, along with North Carolina-based Atrium Health, is undertaking the largest prefab healthcare construction program in the U.S., spanning six new hospitals across the state and saving millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of work. Three of the projects have been completed. The fourth, Atrium Health Lake Normal Hospital in Cornelius, North Carolina, opens in 2025, while the fifth, Carolinas Medical Center Critical Care Tower, has just completed its framing. Rather than building each hospital on site from scratch, the architects are using repeatable units, such as facades, bathroom pods, patient rooms, and mechanical systems. They are built in factories, delivered to the site, and then assembled. The effort has saved $100 million in construction costs and 20% to 50% in construction time on the first three projects alone, NBBJ estimates. The firm’s work includes the country’s largest prefabbed hospital, Carolinas Medical Center (2023), which was built with 60% prefab features. While prefab often results in boxy, generic designs, the firm’s approach is delivered with a flexible design framework that allows for more style and choice than typical prefab architecture. 4. AutodeskFor creating a simple carbon-tracking tool with real impact As the impact of climate change accelerates, determining a building’s carbon footprint—the amount of CO2 it generates from construction to operation to, potentially, demolition—has become essential. But doing so is not easy. Many firms cobble together dispersed, highly technical software and calculators from around the industry. Autodesk, arguably the biggest name in architectural software (with more than 100 million users and yearly revenue over $5 billion, according to its figures), has helped change that. In April 2024, it introduced a new dashboard called Total Carbon Analysis for Architects in Autodesk Forma, its year-old cloud-based software focused on predesign and schematic design. It also incorporated embodied carbon analysis into Autodesk Insight, an energy modeling tool built to work with its Autodesk Revit building information modeling software. Both tools provide dashboards to evaluate both embodied carbon (greenhouse gas emissions generated during the production, transportation, and construction of a building’s materials) and operational carbon (emissions from energy consumption during a building’s operations, like heating, cooling, ventilation, and lighting.) The tools dramatically simplify the process of carbon measurement and allow firms to start tracking carbon usage well before they typically do, allowing them to be far more proactive at improving overall sustainability. Since Total Carbon for Architects was announced in April 2024, it has been used by customers to assess more than 59 billion kg of carbon on their projects, according to Autodesk. 5. MAD ArchitectsFor changing how nature and architecture can coexist Beijing-based MAD Architects, one of China’s most prominent design firms, excels at integrating nature, architecture, and urban design. But this year, it’s pushed the boundaries of what it means to connect nature and the built environment through two stunning projects: the Jiaxing Train Station in Jiaxing, China, and One River North, a mixed-use apartment building in downtown Denver. In Jiaxing, the firm created what it calls a “train station in the forest,” consisting of a new station building (a re-creation of a historic structure that had long been lost), large planted plazas to the north and south, and the renovation of the surrounding People’s Park. The firm placed most of the new station’s program and infrastructure underground to free up space for plantings and public space—in all, 1,500 trees were planted across the site. Benefits include enhanced habitat biodiversity, well-being, air quality, climate regulation, carbon sequestration, stormwater management, and a commercial resurgence in the area. The station’s floating roof, equipped with solar panels, powers the station sustainably, producing about 1.1 million kilowatt-hours of energy annually. In Denver, the 16-story, 187-unit One River North apartment building features a carved, canyonlike outdoor atrium inspired by local natural topography and filled with greenery, waterfalls, and terraces, creating a vertical landscape within the city. Residents can connect with nature in an environment that feels like a hike through the mountains. The project provides a valuable case study for how to densify without sacrificing quality of life. It’s also imbedded with local fauna, increasing local habitat biodiversity, reducing heat absorption, and contributing to stormwater management. 6. ODAFor transforming a parking garage into a beguiling work of architecture In Buenos Aires, a once-decrepit parking garage is now a gleaming mixed-used office building. The transformation is the work of ODA, a New York City architecture firm known for its boundary-pushing work. The building, Paseo Gigena, sits on the edge of a large park in Buenos Aires. The formerly decaying multilevel parking garage now contains restaurants, retail, and a sprawling series of open-air gathering spaces. The firm reused about 80% of the original structure to create 160,000 square feet of office space wrapped in a curving glass facade that mirrors the green surroundings while opening up to views and natural light. The building’s unusual shape was determined largely by how the public would experience it. In addition to a private terrace for workers, the building’s ramped public walkways stretch up from the street to the building’s roof and then curve back down to the El Rosedal de Palermo park on the other side. In effect, they act as an extension of the park itself, providing unique experiences for the public while activating the building and the neighborhood—drawing in new visitors and tenants alike. The project’s public spaces have not yet opened, but 100% of the building’s retail and 80% of its office spaces have already been leased. The concept of energizing areas through unique building reuse and the blending of public and private spaces is a core part of ODA’s work. Currently the firm is completing POST Rotterdam, a mixed-use hub of hospitality, residences, retail, and public spaces in and around a former post office in the center of Rotterdam. 7. GenslerFor making it easy to choose more sustainable building materials Gensler is one of the largest architecture firms in the world, with more than 7,000 employees, 50 offices, and $1.8 billion in revenue. Its innovations can have seismic impacts. The Gensler Product Sustainability Standards (GPS), introduced in 2023 and rolled out firm-wide in 2024, give the architecture and design industry a unified way to measure the carbon impact of the interior products it selects. Firms previously had to wade through more than 100 certifications and eco-labels and consider more than 650 eco-related factors, such as Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs), global-warming potential, ingredient disclosure, manufacturing location, end-of-life options, and indoor air impacts. GPS—developed with input from third-party organizations like the Carbon Leadership Forum, Mindful Materials, and the U.S. Green Building Council—is an open-source tool that gives designers, manufacturers, and clients a data-backed road map on specification, prioritizing sustainability and health. In 2024, Gensler expanded GPS from 12 to 20 product categories, with a focus on high-volume materials like acoustic ceiling tiles, carpet tiles, and resilient flooring. More than 2,800 products have been vetted for GPS compliance, and more than 1,500 Gensler designers and 1,000 third-party manufacturers have trained to employ GPS standards. Gensler estimates that use of GPS has the power to offset up to 341,000 metric tons of carbon annually. 8. DLR GroupFor adapting adaptive reuse to unusual buildings As our cities age and our ecological crises intensify, building reuse has become the most common—and sustainable—category of architecture. Between 50% and 75% percent of a building’s embedded carbon is contained in its foundation, structure, and building envelope. But there is much more potential to be tapped beyond the familiar conversion of industrial spaces and historic offices. Omaha-based architecture firm DLR Group is widening the scope of creative reuse, tackling an unusually diverse range of projects and scales with its extensive in-house expertise. Since reuse can pose significant challenges in areas like engineering, life safety, and systems upgrades, DLR’s ability to address all at once is a major advantage. As a result, it has retrofitted an impressive breadth of buildings, including malls, big box stores, strip malls, offices, hospitals, libraries, post offices, and even jails. Its recent work includes transforming a department store in Boulder, Colorado, into a biotech hub for the diagnostic solutions company Biodesix (2024) and converting a former probation office in Whittier, California, into the Greater Whittier LGBTQ+ Community Center (2024). For the Biodesix office, the firm revamped insufficient mechanical systems and cut into the building envelope to let natural daylight penetrate deep into the interior. In Whittier, it installed interior partition walls, colorful finishes, and new electrical and mechanical systems. DLR Group’s upcoming conversion of a department store into the Albany Museum of Art, meanwhile, will avoid about 65% of the embodied carbon emissions (in this case, about 1,600 metric tons) of a new building. 9. Diamond SchmittFor turning buildings into solar panels Renowned Canadian architecture firm Diamond Schmitt is pioneering the use of building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) cladding in North America. BIPV, which incorporates photovoltaic cells into surfaces like concrete, glass, or stone, is common in Europe but has been slow to catch on in North America. Diamond Schmitt advocates for the technology as an easy-to-install, essential tool in the push toward net zero buildings across the continent. The year-old Innovation Village at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, serves as the most vibrant case study for Diamond Schmitt’s approach. The 95,000-square-foot space, designed to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration, features a custom panelized, staggered opaque-glass BIPV cladding, ranging from 120W to 470W per pane and generating an estimated 18% of the building’s power requirements. The panels’ efficiency is similar to that of typical solar cells, but since they are imbedded into the facade, they can provide more usable surface area. Diamond Schmitt now has more than half a dozen BIPV projects in the works across Canada, and it both promotes BIPV and helps shape its incentives and regulations. The firm works with Canadian cities, educational institutions, the Canadian Green Building Council (CAGBC), and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada to increase BIPV usage via presentations, conferences, awards, and marketing. And it collaborated with CAGBC to model energy requirements and performance opportunities for BIPV buildings. The result: buildings that effectively function as their own solar panel. 10. Gresham SmithFor quantifying the built environment and then improving on it Nashville-based design, planning, and engineering consultancy Gresham Smith‘s new Empathic Insights platform, MPATH, quantifies and analyzes how people feel in built environments via changes in heart rate collected by modern wearables or Bluetooth heart straps. The firm uses these insights to test and then improve designs of buildings, public spaces, and urban infrastructure. The firm recently deployed MPATH with the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, identifying high-stress locations like intersections, alleys, and parking lots. Guided by the data, the city enhanced focus areas with elements like bikeway protection, improved way finding, and green-painted bike lanes. The firm then rerecorded MPATH data, which showed almost across-the-board improvements to people’s sense of comfort and safety. Gresham Smith also collaborated with students at the University of Louisville to study the impacts of diverse urban conditions in the city, including green spaces, street trees, sky views, curb ramps, blank walls, private drives, and street furniture. That effort layered in data gathered by external sensors measuring the impacts of external stressors like lighting, humidity, and temperature. The results of that study—which are being shared with architects, engineers, urban planners, and policymakers in a white paper—are intended to help guide more informed architecture and urban design in the future. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

The AI industry hit a significant bend in the road toward artificial general intelligence in 2024. Previously, the stunning intelligence gains that led to chatbots such ChatGPT and Claude had come from supersizing models and the data and computing power used to train them. When the progress from massive scaling leveled off, researchers knew they would need a new strategy, beyond training, to keep moving toward AGI models that are broadly smarter than humans. Starting with OpenAI’s pivotal o1 model, researchers began to apply more computing power to the real-time reasoning a model does just after a user prompts it with a problem or question. o1 required more time to produce answers than other models, but its answers were clearly better than those of non-reasoning models. The o1 model rose quickly to the top of the rankings in common benchmark tests, and soon Google DeepMind, Anthropic, DeepSeek and others were training their models for real-time reasoning. The big AI labs would now need even more of the Nvidia GPUs they’d been using for training to support all the real-time reasoning their models would be doing. That’s part of the reason Nvidia saw its stock price rise 171% in 2024. The chip company had been reading the tea leaves and built new features into its GPUs that made them even better suited to real-time inference than before. The result was a new architecture called Blackwell, and new chips called the B100 and B200. Nvidia unveiled the new GPUs in March 2024 and quickly sold its entire 2024 supply to the largest data center operators. Even before the appearance of new reasoning models, some of AI’s hottest companies produced state-of-the-art new AI systems. Google DeepMind broke through with a family of natively multi-modal models called Gemini that understand imagery and audio as well as they do language. Anthropic continued to put intense pressure on OpenAI, and was first to release an AI model that could perform task on a user’s computer. Mistral released impressive new small language models that can run on laptops and even phones with its Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B, as did Microsoft with its Phi-3 and Phi-4 models. And Runway again made its case for the state-of-the-art with its new Gen-3 Alpha video generation models. And all the while a small AI lab in China was quietly developing new AI models, including reasoning models, that would begin sending shockwaves through the AI industry by the end of 2024. DeepSeek—#1 on our list of the most innovative companies in Asia-Pacific—trained state-of-the-art models at far lower cost and with far less GPU power than anyone thought possible. It even showed its work through research papers and by open-sourcing its models. DeepSeek’s breakthroughs caused some angst, but its fresh thinking and openness will likely spur bigger and faster innovations from the world’s top AI companies by this time next year. 1. NvidiaFor arming employees with the tools to get their jobs done Large-language model makers continue to pour money into realizing the lofty ambitions of their AI systems. But one company is already reaping the rewards. Nvidia kicked off the AI race by providing the computing power with its market-dominating graphics processing units (GPUs). Now, as its customers chase human-level intelligence, its groundbreaking Blackwell processor and platform is ready. For general model training tasks, the Blackwell processor is up to 2.5 times more powerful than its predecessor, the H100, and requires significantly less energy to operate. The largest data center operators and AI labs, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla and xAI, are buying or planning to buy Blackwell GPUs by the hundreds of thousands. While recent models from China’s DeepSeek and Alibaba have made big strides in wringing cutting-edge AI out of older, less powerful Nvidia GPUs, the company isn’t just cranking out processors and waiting to see what the world does with them. Instead, it’s actively building platforms for everything from drug discovery (Clara for Biopharma) to autonomous vehicles (Drive AGX) to video production (Holoscan) to digital twins (Omniverse). By driving AI progress in an ever-growing array of real-world scenarios, it’s positioning itself for continued growth, even if future models don’t need all the computational muscle they can get. Read more about Nvidia, honored as No. 2 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025. 2. OpenAIFor improving AI by giving it more time to think Since 2019, OpenAI has continually improved its models by giving them more training data and computing power. The rest of the industry has followed its lead. Now that researchers are seeing diminishing returns from this scaling strategy, OpenAI needed an alternative route toward its goal of creating AI models that are smarter than humans in most tasks–in other words, models that can reach artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company found it, and the resulting model is called o1. Instead of scaling up training data and compute time while the model is pre-trained, OpenAI researchers built o1 to spend more time and computing power at inference, when the model is deployed and answering user prompts. While doing this, the model collects and remembers contextual data, both from the user and from relevant data sources. It takes a trial-and-error approach to figuring out the best route to an answer. The model generates PhD-level answers to complex questions, landing it on top of performance benchmark rankings. OpenAI o1 “experimental” and “mini” versions are available to ChatGPT Plus users. The company offers a new service called ChatGPT Pro that provides unlimited access to o1 proper for $200 per month. In December of 2024 OpenAI announced o1’s successor, o3, and in February 2025 it gave paid users access to o3-mini, a smaller, faster version that excels in science, math, and coding. The biggest impact of OpenAI’s new reasoning models is proving to the industry that scaling up computing at inference time may be a viable path to making new intelligence breakthroughs on the way to AGI. 3. Google DeepMindFor delivering a truly multi-modal AI model The foundational research in AI model architecture and model training that led to the chatbots of today happened at Google in the late 2010s. The search giant developed a large language model-powered chatbot long before ChatGPT, but, as the story goes, it hesitated to expose the technology to the public because of concerns over safety, privacy, and legal risks. That hesitation put Google behind in the AI race that ensued with the launch of ChatGPT. The release of Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.0 in 2024 marked the moment when Google officially caught up. Gemini 2.0 is the first mass market AI model that is natively “multimodal,” meaning that it can process and generate images, video, audio, and computer code the same way it does text. This makes it possible for the model to watch a video clip, or live video from a phone camera, and quickly analyze and reason about it. The Gemini model is also notable for being able to control other Google services such as Maps and Search. This is Google beginning to flex–combining its AI research with its legacy information and productivity tools. Gemini is one of the first AI models capable of working autonomously and reasoning its way through complex problems on the behalf of the user. The Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model even shows the user the thought process it used to reach an answer. And in December, Google showed off Project Mariner, a Gemini-based agentic AI feature designed to perform tasks such as online grocery shopping on behalf of the user. 4. AnthropicFor imbuing Claude with the ability to use a computer Generative AI has so far been used mainly for a few tasks: writing and summarizing text as well as generating images. The next step is making large language models reason and use tools. Anthropic’s “Computer Use” model gave us our first look into that future. Starting with 2024’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Anthropic’s model can perceive what’s happening on the user’s screen, including internet content. It can operate a cursor, click buttons, and type in text. In a video, a Claude researcher demonstrated how Claude can fill out a form based on information available at the websites open in the browser tabs. It can complete tasks such as building a personal website or sorting the logistics of a day trip. It’s wild to watch the AI work, clicking open new tabs, running searches, and filling in data fields. Right now the model runs slowly and doesn’t always get the right answer, but that’s likely to change quickly as Anthropic finds and fixes the model’s pitfalls. Google’s aforementioned Project Mariner followed Anthropic’s lead in December, and OpenAI introduced its own computer use model, Operator, in January 2025. In February 2025, Anthropic moved on to its next major iteration of Claude, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a larger model that can automatically switch into reasoning mode for hard questions. 5. MicrosoftFor pushing the state-of-the-art in small language models The development of Microsoft’s Phi models started out with a question posed by the company’s researchers in 2023: “How small can we make a model that shows signs of emerging intelligence?” This turns out to be an important moment in the evolution of “small language models,” or models that perform well in scenarios where memory, processing power, or connectivity are limited, and response speed is important. During 2024, Microsoft released two generations of small models that exhibited reasoning and logic capabilities that hadn’t been explicitly trained into them. In April the company released a series of Phi-3 models that excel in language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks–probably owing to the fact that Microsoft trained them using synthetic data generated by much larger and more capable LLMs. People downloaded variants of the open-source Phi-3 more than 4.5 million times on HuggingFace during 2024. In late 2024, Microsoft released its Phi-4 small language models, which improved on the Phi-3 models in reasoning-focused tasks and even outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o on the GPQA (scientific questions) and MATH benchmarks. Microsoft released the model under an open-source and open-weights license, so developers can use it to develop edge models or apps that run on phones or laptops. In less than a month, Phi-4 was downloaded 375,000 times on HuggingFace. 6. AmazonFor building a cost-effective rival to Nvidia’s GPU Amazon AWS recently released a new version of its Tranium processor for AI, called Trainium2, which—in some settings—could challenge the dominance of Nvidia GPUs. The Trainium2 chip is built to supply the massive computing power used in training the largest generative AI models, and for inference time work after the model has been deployed. AWS says Trainium is 30% to 40% more cost-effective in jobs normally done by GPUs. Trainium2 cures the power and software integration deficiencies seen in the first Trainium chip, says Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis, and puts Amazon “on a path” toward catching up to Nvidia. (Note that AWS itself remains very reliant on NVIDIA for GPUs.) Unseating Nvidia is difficult because customers get locked in to building on top of Nvidia’s CUDA software layer, which lets researchers control how their models use the chip’s resources. Amazon offers its own kernel control software layer called Neuron Kernel Interface (NKI), which, like CUDA, gives researchers granular control over how the chip kernels work together. Patel points out that Trainium2 is still untested at scale. AWS is now building a server cluster with 400,000 Trainium2 chips for Anthropic, which could teach it a lot about making its AI chips work well together in big numbers. 7. ArmFor making AI data centers more cost effective and efficient The British semiconductor designer Arm has long provided the tech industry with the architecture used in chips that power small devices such as phones, sensors, and IoT hardware. This takes on new importance as a new era arrives in which edge device chips will run AI models. But data centers will play a huge role in this evolution as well, often handling some or all of the heaviest AI processing and delivering the results down to the edge device. As data centers expand around the world, the amount of electrical power they use will become a pressing consideration. That’s part of the reason Arm’s latest Neoverse CPU architecture focuses on efficiency. It offers a 50% performance improvement over earlier generations, and 20% better performance per watt than processors using competing x86 architectures, the company says. Arm says that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle have all now adopted Arm Neoverse for both general-purpose computing and CPU-based AI inference and training. For example, in 2024 Micerosoft announced its first custom silicon built for the cloud, the Cobalt 100 processor, was built on Arm Neoverse. Some of the largest AI data centers will rely on NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchip, which contains a Hopper GPU and a Grace CPU that uses Neoverse. Arm is reportedly planning to launch its own CPU this year, with Meta as one of its first customers. 8. GretelFor feeding the generative AI boom with synthetic data Over the past year, AI companies have seen diminishing returns from training their models with ever larger amounts of data scraped from the web. They’ve begun focusing less on the quantity of their training data, and more on its quality. That’s why the they’re are spending more and more on non-public and specialty content that the license from publisher partners. AI researchers also must fill gaps or blind spots within their human-generated or human-annotated training data. For this they’ve increasingly turned to synthetic training data generated by special AI models. Gretel gained a higher profile during 2024 by specializing in creating and curating synthetic training data. The company announced the general availability of its flagship product, Gretel Navigator, which lets developers use natural language or SQL prompts to create, augment, edit, and curate synthetic training datasets, or their fine-tuning and testing datasets. The platform has already attracted a community of more than 150,000 developers who have synthesized more than 350 billion pieces of training data. Other industry players have taken notice. Gretel partnered with Google to make its synthetic training data easily available to Google Cloud customers. The company announced a similar partnership with Databricks in June, which allows that company’s enterprise customers to access synthetic training data for their models running within the Databricks cloud. 9. Mistral AIFor creating small AI models that run in laptops and phones Mistral AI, France’s entry into the generative AI race, has constantly put pressure on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google at the leading edge of frontier AI model development. Mistral AI released a string of new models containing significant technological advances in 2024, and demonstrated rapid growth in its business, both through direct marketing of its APIs and through strategic partnerships. Early in the year the company produced a pair of open-source models called Mixtral, notable for its innovative use of the “mixture of experts” architecture, in which only a specialized subset of the model’s parameters are put in play to handle a query, improving efficiency. In July 2024 Mistral announced Mistral Large 2, which, at 123 billion parameters, showed significant improvements in code generation, maths, reasoning, and function calling. The French company also released Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B–both of which are smaller models that can run in laptops or phones and store about 50 text pages of context information provided by the user. Mistral has seen success in Europe by marketing itself as a low-cost and flexible alternative to U.S. AI companies like OpenAI. It also continued its expansion into the U.S. enterprise market during 2024. In June, the company raised a $640 million funding round, led by the venture capital firm General Catalyst. The round increased Mistral’s valuation to roughly $6.2 billion. 10. Fireworks AIFor bringing a plug-and-play model to AI development and deployment Fireworks provides a custom runtime environment that removes some of the considerable engineering work typically associated with building infrastructure for AI deployments. Using the Fireworks platform, enterprises can plug in any of more than 100 AI models, then customize and fine-tune them for their specific use cases. The company introduced new products during 2024 that will equip it to ride some important waves in the AI industry. For one, developers have become more concerned about how quickly AI-powered models and apps respond to user requests. Fireworks debuted its FireAttentionV2, an optimization and quantization software that speeds up the work of models and reduces network latency. Secondly, AI systems are increasingly not single models but “pipelines” that call different models and tools using APIs. A new FireFunction V2 software works as an orchestrator of all the components in these increasingly complex systems, especially as enterprises launch more autonomous AI apps. Fireworks says it saw a 600% rise in revenue growth in 2024. Its customer base includes Verizon, DoorDash, Uber, Quora, Upwork, and other known names. 11. Snorkel AIFor helping businesses prepare their data for use in AI models Enterprises have learned that their AI systems are only as good as their data. And Snorkel AI has made an impressive business out of helping enterprises get their proprietary data ready for use in AI models. The company’s Snorkel Flow AI data development platform gives companies a cost-efficient way to label and curate their proprietary data so that it can be used to customize and evaluate AI models for their unique business purposes. In 2024, Snorkel added support for images, letting companies train multimodal AI models and image generators using their own proprietary images. It also added retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to its platform, which allowed its customers to retrieve only the most relevant chunks of information from long documents–such as proprietary knowledge base content–for use in training the AI. Snorkel Custom, a higher-touch new service level, puts the company’s machine learning experts to work on projects directly with the customer. Snorkel says its year-over-year annual bookings doubled during 2024, with triple-digit growth in annual bookings in each of the last three years. Six of the largest banks now use Snorkel Flow, the company says, as well as brands such as Chubb, Wayfair, and Experian. 12. CalypsoAIFor letting companies see the logic behind AI decisions in real time As AI becomes more instrumental in critical decision-making processes, enterprises are looking for ways to gain more visibility into the workings of the models. That goes double for companies in regulated industries that must constantly watch for bias and other unintended outputs. CalypsoAI was among the first to recognize this emerging need, and it quickly responded with enhanced explainability features in its AI infrastructure platform. What’s surprising about Calypso is the reach of its observability technology. In 2024 the company launched its AI Security Platform, which protects enterprise data by securing, auditing, and monitoring all active generative AI models a company may be using, regardless of the model vendor or whether the model is hosted internally or externally. Calypso also introduced new visualization tools that allow users to see the logic behind AI decisions in real time. The market is responding to Calypso’s shift toward AI observability. The company says it saw a 10x inclease in its revenues during 2024, and expects its revenues to grow by another 5x in 2025. 13. GalileoFor creating an AI model that can spot hallucinations in other models On the whole, AI systems hallucinate facts and show biases less than they did a year ago. But they’re still prone to these issues, a worrisome situation for any business using AI—especially those in regulated industries such as healthcare and banking. AI development teams use Galileo’s AI platform to measure, optimize, and monitor the accuracy of their models and apps. In early 2024, after two years of research, Galileo released a suite of evaluation models called Luna that are trained to recognize harmful outputs. The models enable Galileo’s platform to quickly scrutinize and score the work of an LLM while it’s in the process of stringing together the tokens that will form its response. This takes the system about only about 200 milliseconds, leaving time to flag and prevent the AI’s output from being seen by a user. It’s possible to use a standard LLM to perform this task, but it’s expensive. Galileo’s purpose-built models are more accurate, more cost-efficient, and, importantly, faster. Galileo says it quadrupled its customer count in 2024, and that it counts Twilio, Reddit, Chegg, Comcast, and JP Morgan Chase as clients. The startup also raised a $68 million funding round from investors such as HuggingFace CEO Clement Delangue. 14. RunawayFor pairing with Lionsgate to create Hollywood-ready AI tools One of the great hopes—and fears—about AI is that it’ll soon be able to generate video that’s good enough to change the art and economics of filmmaking forever. The technology took some large steps in the direction of that future during 2024, and one of the main companies pushing the state-of-the-art is the New York-based video generation startup Runway. When the company released its new Gen-3 Alpha model in June 2024, many in the AI community took to X to croon about the much improved believability of the generated video. Runway also made major improvements to its tools for controlling the look of AI video. The model was trained on both images and video, and can create video based on either text or image inputs. The company followed up with Gen-3 Alpha Turbo, a more cost-efficient and speedy version of Gen-3. Hollywood has been watching generative AI’s progress closely, and Runway says its now begun producing custom versions of its models for entertainment industry players. It entered into a formal partnership with one such player, Lionsgate Studios, in September 2024. Runway built a custom model for the production company and trained it on Lionsgate’s film catalog. Runway says the model is meant to help Lionsgate’s filmmakers, directors and other creatives “augment” their work while “saving time, money and resources.” Runway believes its arrangement with Lionsgate could serve as a template for similar deals with other production companies. 15. Cerebras SystemsFor taking a bigger-is-better approach to AI chips AI systems, especially large frontier models, require tremendous amounts of computing power to run at scale. That means that thousands or millions of chips must be wired together to share the workload, but the network connections between the chips can slow things down. Cerebras Systems’ technology is designed to reap the speed and efficiency benefits of putting a lot of computing power in one really big chip. The company’s latest WS-3 (third-generation Wafer Scale Engine) chip, for example, is the size of a dinner plate at 814 square millimeters, 56 times larger than NVIDIA’s market-leading H100 chips. The chip packs an astonishing 4 trillion transistors, offers 44 gigabits of memory, and can be clustered together to form supercomputers, such as Condor Galaxy, a “constellation” of interconnected supercomputers Cerebras is developing with its biggest customer, UAE-based AI and cloud computing company G42. So far Cerebras has found a sweet spot in large research organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The company filed papers for an IPO in September 2024. The prospectus says the company’s sales more than tripled to $78.7 million in 2023 and climbed to $136.4 million in the first half of 2024. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Topping this year’s list of MIC honorees in the Asia-Pacific region is a company so innovative that when it emerged from stealth, Fast Company judges and editors were late in the judging process, so we decided to add an unprecedented 11th spot to this category. Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek launched a pair of state-of-the-art, open-source AI models that require far less computing power and capital than those of Western companies, sending shockwaves through Silicon Valley and the Wall Street firms that fund them. Several more Chinese tech companies round out the top slots: Baidu, which runs China’s top search engine, started offering driverless taxi services last summer in select cities and is already outperforming Google’s Waymo robotaxis where it operates. Shenzen company Honor released its Magic V3 phone in July, one of the world’s slimmest folding phones. Xiaomi, known for developing smartphones, entered the electric vehicle market last spring, releasing its first car, the SU7; by the end of the year, after just nine months on the market, its annual sales topped the Tesla Model 3 in China. A handful of 2025 honorees focus on ecological innovations. Lodestone Energy opened its first solar farms last year and already is New Zealand’s leading solar producer. Lodestone is also pioneering agrivoltaics in New Zealand, working with limited land resources to combine solar farms with agricultural and farming land. Who Gives a Crap, Australia’s well-known sustainable toilet paper brand, expanded to the U.S. in May; look out for its colorful, tissue paper–wrapped TP at a Whole Foods near you. Other innovators on the list include an Indian aerospace manufacturer and launch service provider (Agnikul Cosmos); an autonomous robotics company in Singapore that specializes in industrial applications (Venti Technologies); and an Australian AI-powered text-to-image model that set a new bar for image generation, receiving praise for its accuracy, visual fidelity, and creative control (Leonardo.Ai). 1. DeepSeekFor demonstrating the power of open-source AI Chinese company DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the AI and investment communities in January with the release of a pair of state-of-the-art AI models that used far less computing power and capital than anyone had previously thought possible. The innovations were borne of necessity: trade restrictions under the Biden administration limited the company’s access to less powerful GPUs—Nvidia H800s instead of the cutting-edge H100s—and DeepSeek researchers had to develop clever workarounds to save GPU power. They included training the smaller R1 model on the larger model, DeepSeek-V3, to be a reasoning model; refining the mixture-of-experts framework, a neural network that segments a large language model by specialized knowledge, any one of which can handle queries while the rest of the model’s parameters remain idle; and compressing some of the data that the model must retain on its way toward an answer. All of this saved a lot of GPU power without sacrificing the model’s intelligence. What’s more, DeepSeek then published its work in research papers, thereby sharing its AI efficiencies with developers around the world. Silicon Valley, where questions of whether AI has been over-valuated have been swirling for months, is still reckoning with the fallout. Read more about DeepSeek, honored as No. 12 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025. 2. BaiduFor deploying the world’s largest autonomous driving experiment Chinese multinational technology company Baidu specializes in search engine services and artificial intelligence, but the internet services giant has also been expanding into robotaxis. Apollo Go, Baidu’s autonomous ride-hailing service, now operates the world’s largest autonomous driving experiment, in the city of Wuhan. Last July, the company launched a 24/7 service of more than 400 Apollo Go robotaxis that provide driverless rides around the city‚ marking a significant milestone for the sector. The company also operates autonomous taxis in Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai. Apollo Go provided approximately 1.1 million rides across China in Q4 2024 alone—a year-over-year growth of 36%—and has given 9 million cumulative rides. To date, Apollo Go’s cars have traveled more than 80 million miles. In May, the company began testing the Apollo RT6 on public roads, its sixth-generation robotaxi and the first to be built from the ground up (rather than retrofitting existing vehicles). The vehicle costs less than $30,000, which CEO Robin Li said on an earnings call would help establish “a robust foundation for making commuting more affordable.” The company intends to roll its robotaxi service outside of mainland China, to Singapore and the Middle East, and already has acquired a license to test its autonomous vehicles in Hong Kong. 3. Lodestar EnergyFor bringing utility-scale solar power to New Zealand Inspired by its Australian neighbors and the country’s successful embrace of solar power, New Zealand has been steadily increasing its solar capacity by shifting toward larger-scale operations. Lodestone Energy, which launched in 2021, opened its first two solar farms last year, named Kohirā and Rangitaiki. With respective capacities of 33 megawatts and 32 megawatts, they were the two largest solar farms in the country—until Lodestone opened the 42-megawatt Te Herenga o Te Rā, in January. Lodestone a specializes in utility-scale photovoltaic farms that connect directly to the grid, allowing the company to sell its electricity right back to the local utility. Te Herenga o Te Rā alone has the capacity to power nearly 10,000 homes. In New Zealand, where the sheep still outnumber humans and farmland is limited, Lodestone is pioneering the use of agrivoltaics, utilizing the same agricultural land for both sheep grazing and solar power generation. The practice is particularly valued for the economic benefits it provides to farmers, who receive rent from lease agreements and a percentage of the solar assets’ profits. The grazing livestock naturally cuts back the vegetation growing around and beneath the solar modules. Everyone wins, even the sheep. Lodestone plans to break ground this year on Haldon Station, which eventually will have a 180-MW capacity. In the meantime, it plans to open two smaller solar farms, and the company expects by the end of the year to produce enough energy to power 45,000 homes across New Zealand. 4. HonorFor developing the thinnest-ever foldable smart phone Though their share of the overall smartphone market is in the low single digits, foldable smartphones have grown slowly but steadily popular as phone companies release new offerings. One of the best is the Magic V3 by Honor, the Chinese company formerly known as Huawei. Launched in 2024 and with a profile that measures 9.2 millimeters folded and 4.4 millimeters unfolded, the Magic V3 counts among the world’s thinnest folding phones. (For context, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold6 comes in at 12.1 mm folded and 5.6 mm unfolded.) When closed, the Magic V3 feels to be around the same thickness as the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and users say that when opened, the fold crease in the screen is barely noticeable. Users also have praised the phone’s features, including external and internal displays, wireless charging, a long battery life (around 15 hours with moderate use, compared to the 15 Pro Max’s 8.5 hours), water resistance, and high durability despite its sleek profile. The Magic V2 was already overtaking Samsung in Western Europe’s foldable phone market when the V3 began selling outside of China. By September, Honor was outselling its Korean competitor in the foldable phone market; by December, the Magic V3 comprised 21% of all Honor’s device sales. 5. Agnikul CosmosFor launching a single-piece, 3D-printed rocket engine into suborbital flight Ever since the government reformed its space policy in 2020 to allow for greater participation from startups, India’s private space sector has been expanding in every direction. Agnikul Cosmos, an aerospace manufacturer and commercial launch service provider based in Chennai, represents this shift toward privatization. Last May, after four failed attempts, the company successfully completed a test launch for Agnibaan, its small-lift launch vehicle capable of carrying 100-kilogram payloads into low orbit. While its competitors must rely on the government space agency’s launchpad to get to space, Agnibaan launched from Agnikol’s very own launchpad, a first for the budding industry. The sub-orbital test launch in May marked the second such achievement for an Indian private space company, following Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram S rocket launch in November 2022. It also demonstrated the world’s first single-piece 3D-printed semi-cryogenic rocket engine, the Agnikul-built Agnilet. (Semi-cryogenic rocket engines use a mix of kerosene and ultracold liquid oxygen for fuel, which translates to a high thrust-to-weight ratio, cost-effectiveness, and operational simplicity. The kerosene takes up less room than the liquid hydrogen used in fully cryogenic rocket engines, freeing up space for more payloads.) Unlike traditional rocket engines, which can take up to 12 weeks to manufacturer, Agnikul—whose name is a portmanteau derived from the Sanskrit words for fire (अग्नि, or agni)and an ancient type of schooling (गुरुकुल, or gurukul)—says it can produce two of its Agnilet engines each week. 6. Xiaomi TechnologyFor bringing its smartphone knowhow into EVs Xiaomi Technology is primarily known as the world’s third-largest smartphone maker. But the Chinese electronics company ventured into a very different market in 2024: electric vehicles. Its maiden vehicle, the SU7, launched last March to great acclaim. The full-size sedan matches or beats the Tesla Model 3 on performance, range, and cabin technology and starts at the relatively low price of around $30,000. The SU7 is also outfitted with a smart device ecosystem that syncs with Xiaomi’s other products. Industry observers were especially surprised by the great user reviews; no less a fan than Ford CEO Jim Farley sang its praises on a podcast last October, recounting how he’d shipped the “fantastic” SU7 from Shanghai to Chicago and driven it for six months, and now “I don’t want to give it up.” Xiaomi reportedly sold out of its entire SU7 production run of 2024 on the first day it was available. By the end of the year, the company had sold more than 130,000 cars. In October, the company unveiled a prototype of the luxury SU7 Ultra. At a road test at Germany’s legendary motorsports track Nürburgring Nordschleife, the SU7 Ultra broke the record for the fastest four-door sedan. It went on sale this March; Xiaomi plans to release an electronic SUV, the YU7, this summer. 7. Leonardo.AiFor creating a text-to-image AI tool cool enough to catch Canva’s eye As artificial intelligence companies continue the quest to perfect a model for generating images from nothing but text prompts, the Australian startup Leonardo.Ai—founded just three years ago—stood out in 2024 for the June debut of its first text-to-image model, Phoenix. Built in-house, the technology set a new bar for image generation, receiving praise for its accuracy, visual fidelity, and creative control. The next month, the design software giant Canva acquired Leonardo.AI, which will continue to run as a separate entity. Though the terms of the deal have not been disclosed, media reports based on documents from its largest shareholder estimate that Canva paid $320 million for the startup, just two years old at the time. Leonardo.Ai’s founders originally conceived the company as a resource for game designers. But they quickly broadened its mandate to appeal to advertisers, marketers, and designers of all stripes. At the time of acquisition, the startup boasted 19 million registered users. In October, Canva announced Dream Lab, a content creation tool powered by Phoenix, making Leonardo.AI’s technology available to its more than 200 million monthly users. The tool allows Canva’s users to render images in any one of 19 styles from written prompts alone—and that’s just so far. More features are coming soon, including photo prompts and shape references that will allow for more of one of the Leonardo.Ai team’s guiding principles: user customization. 8. Who Gives a CrapFor bringing cheeky, eco-friendly toilet paper around the globe You may not know this—and you may not wish to know—but there’s a good chance your favorite toilet paper brand is helping to destroy one of our planet’s most sensitive ecological systems: Canada’s epic boreal forest. (Check for yourself via the Natural Resources Defense Council’s annual The Issue with Tissue.) One of the brands that received an A rating this year, Who Gives a Crap, will make you forget all about the scratchy, sandpaper-y eco-friendly TP of yore. The Melbourne-based company launched in 2012. But until last year, if you wanted to get your hands on one of its sustainable, 100% recycled rolls outside Australia, you had to order it online. (At least the company sends its plastic-free packages via carbon-neutral shipping.) But last May in the U.S., its colorful, tissue paper–wrapped TP began popping up in select Whole Foods. By the dog days of summer, Who Gives a Crap was available in Whole Foods nationwide. The company is now betting for the first time on more than just toilet paper. In October, it released a three-product line of sustainable garbage bags, for trash, compost, and dog poo. The trash bags are composed of 100% recycled plastic, and the compostable food waste bags decompose within three months at an industrial facility. Who Gives a Crap makes a point to give back, donating half of all profits to charities and NGOs focused on improved access to water, toilets, and hygienic care. To date, they have donated around $12.5 million. 9. Venti TechnologiesFor doing the heavy lifting at one of the world’s largest ports, in Singapore The self-driving-vehicle sector is teeming with companies in competition to make it big on the open road. Venti Technologies, based in Singapore and launched by a team with roots in MIT, stands out for focusing on autonomous technologies for industrial use—specifically in low-speed environments like ports, airports, and warehouses. The company’s suite of special-purpose algorithms is designed to optimize cargo container transportation and works with a wide range of vehicles, allowing the AI-enabled technology to move varying weight loads and distances through complex spaces and changing routes. Venti is entering the fifth year of its partnership agreement with the Port of Singapore Authority to provide self-driving vehicles that transport containers among PSA’s five terminals in the island country. A fleet of dozens of cargo movers guided by Venti’s technology work 24 hours a day and perform around 90% of the inter-yard jobs. The tasks involve more than just moving containers from point A to point B: The vehicles must also be able to interact with sophisticated machinery, like cranes, and load and unload cargo with precision. The AI-enabled vehicles reduce PSA’s handling costs for goods and improve the safety conditions. ​​(Though it does so by replacing people with machines.) Last year, Venti’s vehicles drove 180,000 kilometers and moved an average of 5,000 containers each week. The company also worked with Katoen Natie, a Belgian international logistics company, and says it recently locked in a contract with Norfolk Southern, one of the largest railroad companies in the U.S. 10. IntellectFor expanding mental healthcare access across the Asia Pacific region Intellect, founded in Singapore in 2019 by Theodoric Chew and Asia’s fastest-growing mental health platform, hopes to drastically transform mental healthcare across the Asia Pacific region. The company offers AI-enabled virtual care and tele-consultations via its digital platform; services include counseling, clinical therapy, and medicine management, as well as screening assessments for mental health disorders. One of Chow’s primary goals when he launched Intellect was to increase access to support wherever they operated. Today, Intellect collectively serves 4 million people in 30 languages across 60 countries. The company partnered with Asia’s largest private healthcare group, IHH Healthcare, in 2023 to offer digital mental health programs for IHH patients, along with its staff; its corporate clients have included Dell, ByteDance, Shell, McDonald’s, Singtel, and Visa. Last July, Intellect launched its flagship mental health clinic in Singapore, which blends virtual and IRL care; today, it has six clinics. The company has raised $27 million in funding to date; it plans in the next year to open clinics in Hong Kong, Australia, and Japan. 11. VowFor growing foie gras in a lab from quail cells Lab-grown meat has had a tough go of it. Expensive and difficulty to produce at scale, the high-tech protein’s biggest problem is perception. A lot of people are grossed out by the prospect, considering it sterile, or overly synthetic, or not really food. As the only company in the world selling cultured meat, Australian biotech startup Vow is in the unique position of shaping the public’s perception. It’s doing so with spreadable meats. The company knows how to make a splash. Its first foray into cultured meat was actually a meatball made using wooly mammoth DNA that Vow unveiled two years ago at the Nemo science museum, in Amsterdam. But the wooly mammoth meatball wasn’t for consumption. The company launched its first commercially available product in Singapore last April: Forged Parfait, Vow’s version of liver pâté, with a pink hue and a deeply savory flavor. Seven months later, it revealed its second product of the year, Forged Gras, with the subtly gamey flavor and creamy texture of real foie gras. Both are grown in a bioreactor from the cells of a Japanese quail egg. After restructuring the team toward the end of last year, Vow says its focus for 2025 will be improving popular perceptions of lab-grown meat. While its products are available in select restaurants in Singapore and Hong Kong, the company is awaiting regulatory approval in Australia and is seeking the same from the FDA in the U.S. The company can back up its build-it-and-they-will-come-around mentality with data: it has retained 100% of its restaurant partners, and 93% of diners said they’d gladly eat a Forged dish again. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Innovative organizations are finding ways to make augmented and virtual reality a more efficient, and even more practical, way to interact with technologies and tools, including letting people learn complex skills through virtual training. The businesses in Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies in AR/VR reflect that trend. Texas A&M University has brought AR/VR production into its celebrated Visualization program, letting students learn to build state-of-the-art virtual productions before they leave college. And other organizations are using AR/VR itself for educational purposes. Excurio has built immersive, historically accurate versions of iconic eras from 19th century Paris to ancient Egypt, while Varjo has adapted virtual reality headsets to enable more efficient pilot training, winning approval from the FAA in 2024. FundamentalVR is using the technology to help train surgeons on new procedures and medical equipment, letting users practice techniques before they need to use them on human patients. Squint has created software that makes it easy to train manufacturing workers on hardware and techniques used in a plant, capturing documentation from video of experienced practitioners demonstrating those skills on real hardware. And Haiku has developed virtual twins of real-world digital networks to help train students and experts on cybersecurity operations and respond to diverse attacks through a game-like environment. On the infrastructure side of things, Xreal developed inexpensive AR eyewear that integrates with laptops and smartphones consumers and businesses already have, and Snap’s virtual Lenses let millions of its users tap AR to transform images they capture of the world around them and easily create their own Lenses with AI. And video game engine maker Unity released new versions of its software with added support for quickly building AR and VR features, including interacting with Apple’s Vision Pro headset. 1. XrealFor bringing affordable AR/VR to popular apps and devices For years, Xreal has been known for developing inexpensive AR/VR headsets that integrate with popular devices like smartphones, computers, and tablets. In January 2024, the company debuted its Xreal Air 2 Ultra line of AR glasses, equipped with the cameras and processing power necessary to provide spatial computing experiences comparable to professional devices from Apple and Meta, all for $699. And in June 2024, it launched the Xreal Beam Pro, a smartphone-like touchscreen device that includes Google Play Store support, but which is designed for use with its glasses. Users can use the device as a pointer or control apps with its touchscreen while privately viewing apps, movies, or other content in augmented reality. The device has two USB-C ports, which allow it to stay plugged in while also connected to AR glasses, and supports Bluetooth audio output and keyboards. Xreal announced in January 2024 it had raised an additional $60 million in funding for further development of its AR glasses. And in October, it shared that it has sold more than 430,000 pairs of glasses as it promoted new retail distribution deals around the world, including with Micro Center in the United States. 2. SquintFor training manufacturing workers with AR/VR and AI Squint, which launched in 2022, works with manufacturing companies to generate AR demos of common procedures. In April 2024, it unveiled Squint 2.0, which can use AI to automatically turn videos of a factory task into an AR demo for training or as a process refresher. The new software also includes an AI copilot that answers further questions users may have based on uploaded manuals and other relevant documents. Companies using the technology have found that it cuts downtime, boosts worker productivity, and significantly reduces the time needed to produce usable instructions. Squint’s mobile app can also help customers identify employees who may need additional training based on questions the employees ask, or highlight difficult tasks that could be simplified or streamlined. Customers include Ford, Michelin, and Colgate-Palmolive. In February 2024, the company also released Expert Eyes, an Apple Vision Pro app that provides VR video instructions for common tasks such as preparing recipes or changing a flat tire. 3. ExcurioFor bringing virtual reality experiences—and audiences—to museums Excurio builds immersive, historically accurate installations that feature a shared virtual reality for up to 100 simultaneous attendees. In 2024, the company made its North American debut with Horizon of Khufu, an exhibit in which visitors to sites in Montreal, Atlanta, and New York City don VR headsets to explore Egyptian life in the time of the pharaohs. It soon established a permanent venue in New York. The company also debuted Tonight with the Impressionists, Paris 1874, at the Musée d’Orsay in March 2024. In the 45-minute experience, visitors stroll with friends and family through the first Impressionist exhibit and the figures that inhabited artistic Paris 150 years ago. The exhibit brought new visitors to the storied institution, with 39% of visitors between 18 and 25 saying they were on their first trip to the museum, and 90% of visitors saying they had come specifically for the VR expedition. Other exhibits focus on the history of Notre Dame and the evolution of life on Earth across nine eras and landscapes. The company has drawn more than 2 million visitors to its expeditions across 12 venues in five countries around the world. 4. VarjoFor bringing flight training into the VR age Varjo creates leading-edge virtual and augmented reality headsets and software used to train complex, critical skills such as piloting planes. In August, the company and its partner Loft Dynamics announced that their VR-powered pilot training had become the first approved by the FAA to qualify toward pilot certification. In December 2023, Varjo launched its latest hardware series, the XR-4. It is designed to match the visual fidelity of users’ eyes, enabling wearers to examine sharp details in virtual and surrounding real-world environments such as a cockpit. The XR-4 Focus Edition offers particularly high pixel density for enhanced realism. And for applications demanding maximum resilience, the Secure Edition, made in a specialized facility, offers assurance against tampering during manufacturing and offline operation to prevent network-based hacking. Varjo and partner Dogfight Boss also announced in August that their headset-based F-16 simulator had been deployed to help Ukraine train fighter pilots in its war with Russia. In the U.S., the company is working with the Army on virtual helicopter training and announced in November that it won a contract through the Air Force’s “Super Goggle” virtual flight training challenge. 5. FundamentalVRFor using virtual reality to train the next generation of surgeons FundamentalVR uses VR to train surgeons on new techniques and equipment. In 2024, it added new features to its Fundamental Surgery platform to track user gestures, letting educators and makers of medical devices more efficiently see how quickly doctors understand products and techniques. AI-powered assessments guide users through refining their skills and improving techniques. The system can detect in real time when trainees make a mistake, reducing the risk of them making dangerous errors when working with real-life patients. And a new AI-powered tutoring system, dubbed Maia, can converse with doctors about the virtual environment and answer questions, reducing the need for one-size-fits-all written instructions. In October, the American Academy of Ophthalmology and FundamentalVR launched a new pediatric eye surgery training program. The company has also received accreditation from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the Royal College of Surgeons of England for its training technologies. In September 2024, FundamentalVR released a new version of its Apple Vision Pro app, letting users practice skills like an ultrasound-guided femoral access procedure in an immersive virtual environment. FundamentalVR also supports haptic feedback, providing a realistic tactile experience to users as they practice surgery. The company reported a 59% year-over-year increase in revenue in 2024. 6. RembrandFor using AR and AI to make ads and product placements less annoying Rembrand uses augmented reality and generative AI technology to insert less annoying, more noticeable ads into online video. The company’s AI Studio technology, released in June 2024, lets video creators or ad studios easily insert promotional content like branded posters into videos post-production, with the AI adjusting the lighting, angles, and other attributes to make the inserted content look more natural. In June, the company announced support for more complex ad units, including 3D animated characters such as brand mascots or semi-transparent hologram ads that can interact with on-screen environments. Rembrand’s ads are much easier to insert than traditional after-the-fact product placement. Integrated right into the video, they’re less likely to send users switching to another app or video than traditional interruptive ads. The company’s supported platforms include YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitch and Instagram. In 2024, ads that it created with companies like Lenovo, PepsiCo and L’Oreal registered greater visibility than traditional ads. Working with PepsiCo brands Starry and Bubly across 14 YouTube and TikTok content creators, a campaign initially targeting 7 million impressions ultimately received over 18.5 million global views. 7. HaikuFor using virtual gaming to teach real world cybersecurity Haiku uses the Unity game engine to build digital roleplaying games that help employers and colleges train workers and students on cybersecurity. The company says the audience for roleplaying games is 60% female, meaning the approach can help narrow the gender gap in cybersecurity (and most capture-the-flag competitions on the platform have been won by women). In 2024, the company released support for new digital protocols, operating systems, and 5G network emulation. It also added features letting companies build digital twins of their own networks—virtual environments where employees can practice without disrupting real operations, even working offline for security’s sake. The company in December 2023 released Haiku Forge, which makes it easier for businesses to customize their own experiences. Haiku even supports emulation of real network compromises, enabling virtual versions of real-world attacks and responses to those threats. In July, it won a DARPA award to support its expansion into 5G training. In May 2024, the company secured funding from the U.S. Air Force to add more advanced AI into its experiences. The military branch followed up in August with an additional $1.8 million contract to support cybersecurity training for its ranks. 8. UnityFor creating a technical foundation for the latest AR/VR experiences Unity has long allowed developers to build games and other interactive experiences that work across multiple computing platforms. In January 2024, it announced support for Apple’s visionOS, unveiling so-called PolySpatial technology that makes it easy for apps and games to exist with content in the real world. The technology has been used by brands like Audi and Diageo to provide Apple Vision Pro access to information about products like the Audi Q6 e-tron and Don Julio tequila, and game makers harnessed Unity’s cross-platform support to quickly bring apps to Apple’s new VR platform. Businesses like KLM and Bosch Rexroth have also used Unity’s virtual reality tech for more than playing games, deploying it for everything from training employees to showing off new products in virtual showrooms. And in October 2024, the company launched Unity 6, the latest version of its engine. In addition to targeting improved performance and enabling powerful new effects, VR-specific features include enhanced interactions based on VR motion sensors, support for foveated high-resolution rendering based on eye tracking, and developer templates to simplify building multiplayer VR games. 9. SnapFor putting the power of AR into millions of hands In 2024, Snapchat parent Snap unveiled new Lenses to customize selfies and surroundings, transforming images into virtual worlds of the past or future in just seconds versus the minutes of previous iterations. In June, the company launched Lens Studio 5.0, giving developers more power to build and share their own Lenses, and in September, it unveiled Easy Lens, which uses generative AI to create custom Lenses with a descriptive prompt. More than 375,000 users have made more than 4 million Lenses; on average, more than 300 million people use Snap’s Lenses every day. The company also revealed in September that its AI was gaining more powerful features to let it translate written text, identify plants and other objects, and even interpret complex parking signs. Snap in September also introduced a new version of its Spectacles—AR glasses that support Lenses—powered by a new Snap OS. LEGO Group, ILM Immersive, Niantic, and Wabisabi Games are already among those using Lens Studio to create new AR experiences for Spectacles, which are available to developers for $99 per month. 10. Texas A&M UniversityFor bringing AR/VR production experience to the next generation of students In February 2024, Texas A&M approved a new Virtual Production Institute after a $25 million award from the Texas legislature, helping the state’s oldest public university continue to meet evolving student and industry needs. The Institute, based at the Bryan-College Station campus with an extension at the Texas A&M-Fort Worth campus, will train students for careers using extended reality. New virtual production stages enable immersive effects beyond what green screens can support, and the Institute intends to offer virtual workforce training for sectors that include healthcare, the military, and manufacturing. The facility is also likely to be used for building a virtual twin of a manufacturing environment, letting a company see how best to lay out robotics and other features of the factory. In addition, the university debuted a new minor in virtual production. Graduate students in the school’s storied Visualization program have already begun coursework in virtual production, working with experts at Texas’s own Stray Vista Studios. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article