ResidentialBusiness

When considering a background check, you might wonder if a reference number is necessary. Although it’s not a strict requirement, having one can streamline the process. Reference numbers act as unique identifiers, which helps reduce errors and confusion between candidates, employers, and background check providers. They furthermore guarantee accurate tracking of compliance documentation. Comprehending the role of these numbers is essential, especially when traversing the intricacies of background checks and their implications. What else should you know about the background check process? Key Takeaways A reference number is not mandatory for background checks but is highly beneficial for tracking and organizing candidate screenings. It streamlines communication between employers, background check providers, and candidates, reducing potential errors. Reference numbers create a clear audit trail for compliance documentation in various industries. Using reference numbers helps link relevant data to the correct candidate, enhancing the overall background check process. While optional, incorporating reference numbers can improve efficiency and data integrity in the hiring process. Understanding Background Checks When you apply for a job, comprehending background checks is essential, as they play a significant role in the hiring process. A Maryland background check typically involves verifying your criminal history, employment record, and educational credentials. Employers often conduct a criminal record check MD to assess any possible legal issues that could affect your suitability for the role. This process helps mitigate the risks associated with negligent hiring, guaranteeing a safer workplace for everyone. Before employers initiate a background check, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires them to obtain your written consent. This guarantees transparency throughout the process. In addition, some employers might conduct a reference check, where they contact your previous employers or colleagues to gather insights about your work ethic and character. Grasping these components can help you prepare for what employers will look for, making you a stronger candidate in the competitive job market. The Role of Reference Numbers Reference numbers play a crucial role in the background check process, serving as unique identifiers for each candidate’s screening. When you initiate a background check, especially a Maryland criminal background check, a reference number is assigned to help track and organize the screening. This number makes it easier for employers and background check companies to manage multiple requests efficiently, allowing quick access to specific candidate information during the hiring process. Using a reference number streamlines communication between employers, background check providers, and candidates, minimizing errors or confusion about applicant records. It’s particularly beneficial in industries that require compliance documentation, as reference numbers provide a clear audit trail for each background check conducted. By using these numbers, employers can easily retrieve and review background check results, ultimately making the hiring decision process more organized and effective. Types of Background Checks Background checks encompass a variety of screenings that help employers assess a candidate’s suitability for a position. One key type is the Maryland criminal background check, which reveals any past legal issues, such as arrests or convictions, that could impact hiring decisions. A criminal history records check in Maryland guarantees thorough investigation into an applicant’s legal past. In addition to criminal checks, employment verification is vital; it confirms the authenticity of job titles, dates of employment, and reasons for leaving previous positions. Education verification adds another layer by validating degrees and certifications claimed by candidates, confirming they meet job qualifications. Finally, a credit history check evaluates an individual’s creditworthiness, which is especially important in roles with financial responsibilities. Together, these checks create a detailed md state background check, enabling employers to make informed hiring decisions. Importance of Accurate Information Accurate information in background checks is crucial for verifying a candidate’s identity and history, which directly impacts your hiring decisions. When you guarantee data accuracy, you minimize the risk of delays, legal issues, and poor hires based on incorrect information. Using reference numbers not just helps in efficiently tracking requests but likewise links relevant data to the right candidate, streamlining the entire process. Ensuring Data Accuracy When you’re conducting background checks, ensuring the information you rely on is accurate is vital for safeguarding your hiring process. An effective Maryland background search requires verifying data to prevent potential hiring risks associated with false or misleading information. A Maryland state criminal background check can reveal disqualifying histories that candidates mightn’t disclose. By maintaining data integrity, you can identify discrepancies that may indicate dishonesty, enhancing your hiring process. Accurate information contributes to efficiency, reducing delays caused by disputes over incorrect data or the need for further verification. Ultimately, ensuring data accuracy protects your organization’s reputation and nurtures trust with candidates, creating a transparent hiring environment fundamental for long-term success. Impact on Hiring Decisions Inaccurate information can greatly skew hiring decisions, leading to costly consequences for your organization. With 30% of job applicants providing false details about their employment history, relying on unverified information can mislead you. A study shows that 75% of employers found discrepancies in candidates’ resumes through background checks, underscoring the need for thorough verification. Conducting detailed background checks not only reduces the risk of negligent hiring lawsuits, which can cost thousands in legal fees but additionally improves workplace safety by identifying candidates with troubling histories. Moreover, accurate background information can enhance overall hire quality, as companies that perform effective screenings experience 50% lower turnover rates, ultimately benefiting your organization’s stability and reputation. How Background Checks Are Conducted Background checks are essential for employers aiming to verify a candidate’s qualifications and background before making hiring decisions. The process typically starts by obtaining consent from the candidate, as mandated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Once consent is secured, specialized companies conduct the checks, utilizing various databases to gather information on criminal history, employment verification, and educational background. Depending on the job requirements and industry regulations, background checks may include searches for criminal records, credit history, and driving records. Employers often establish a clear policy outlining the types of checks performed, ensuring compliance with legal standards throughout the process. Many background check services offer automated systems, streamlining the process and enabling efficient tracking and reporting of results. By following these steps, employers can make informed decisions as they respect candidates’ rights and ensure a fair hiring process. When a Reference Number Is Useful Utilizing a reference number in the background check process can greatly boost efficiency and accuracy for employers. This system allows you and background check companies to track and retrieve specific screening reports tied to individual candidates easily. By implementing reference numbers, you maintain organization and clarity when managing multiple background checks, ensuring that each candidate’s information aligns accurately with their profile. Moreover, reference numbers improve communication between you and background check providers, allowing for quicker resolution of discrepancies or issues that may arise. In industries where regulatory compliance is essential, these numbers create a clear audit trail for each background check conducted, ensuring adherence to legal protocols. Finally, reference numbers help you efficiently manage large volumes of applicant data, greatly reducing the risk of misidentifying candidates or their results. Overall, incorporating reference numbers can streamline your hiring process and boost overall outcomes. Common Misconceptions About Background Checks Misconceptions about background checks can lead to confusion and misinformed decisions during the hiring process. One common belief is that a reference number is necessary, but background checks actually rely on personal details like your name, date of birth, and Social Security number. Many likewise assume that all background checks are uniform; nonetheless, different industries require specific checks based on regulatory needs, particularly in healthcare or finance. Some people think background checks reveal every past behavior, but they only reflect the specific searches conducted and relevant jurisdictions, meaning some records might be inaccessible. Furthermore, it’s a myth that these checks automatically verify all candidate information. Although they can confirm employment and education, gaps in history may not be addressed. Finally, background checks focus on objective data and official records, not subjective assessments of a candidate’s character or work ethic. Comprehending these misconceptions is vital for informed hiring decisions. Differences Between Background and Reference Checks When comparing background checks and reference checks, it’s important to understand their distinct purposes and the types of information they assess. Background checks primarily focus on verifying an applicant’s criminal history, employment, and education, ensuring safety and qualifications. Conversely, reference checks aim to evaluate a candidate’s work ethic, interpersonal skills, and compatibility with company culture, providing insights that are often more subjective. Purpose of Each Check Many employers rely on both background checks and reference checks to make informed hiring decisions, each serving a distinct purpose. Comprehending these differences can guide your hiring strategy effectively. Background Checks: Focus on verifying factual records like criminal history, education, and employment, ensuring workplace safety and compliance. Reference Checks: Assess a candidate’s work ethic and interpersonal skills through insights from previous employers or colleagues. Purpose of Background Checks: Screen out unqualified candidates and protect your brand by identifying potential red flags. Purpose of Reference Checks: Validate candidates’ skills and cultural fit, enhancing the overall hiring decision process. Key Information Assessed Comprehending the key information assessed through background checks and reference checks is vital for effective hiring strategies. Background checks typically investigate an applicant’s criminal history, employment history, educational qualifications, and credentials. These checks verify the accuracy of reported information and reveal any disqualifying criminal records. Conversely, reference checks focus on evaluating an applicant’s work ethic, interpersonal skills, and cultural fit within your organization. They provide insights into past job performance from previous employers or colleagues. Meanwhile, industry regulations often mandate background checks in sectors like healthcare and finance. Reference checks are widely used across all industries. Both checks are fundamental, as background checks improve workplace safety, whereas reference checks help you understand a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. Legal Considerations in Background Checks Legal considerations in background checks play a crucial role in the hiring process, ensuring fairness and compliance with established norms. As an employer or candidate, you need to understand these key points: Written Consent: The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) mandates that employers obtain written consent from candidates before conducting background checks. State Laws: Different states have specific laws governing background checks, including notification and consent requirements, which can vary markedly. Disclosure Requirement: Employers must provide clear disclosure regarding the use of background checks, typically through a separate document. Adverse Action Process: If an employer opts against hiring based on background check information, they must follow an adverse action process, including a pre-adverse action notice to the candidate. Steps to Prepare for a Background Check Preparing for a background check involves several important steps that guarantee compliance and accuracy. First, create a compliant policy outlining your procedures to confirm adherence to regulations like the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Next, obtain written consent from the candidate, as this is legally required before you can initiate any checks. Collect all necessary information from the candidate, including their full name, date of birth, Social Security number, and addresses, which are critical for accurate searches. It’s also important to partner with a reliable background check company experienced in the industry, as this confirms both accuracy and compliance. Furthermore, keep candidates informed throughout the screening process by providing updates on the status of their background check and addressing any potential issues that arise. Following these steps will help streamline the process and maintain transparency, which is essential for building trust with candidates. Impact of Background Check Findings Even though background check findings can play a crucial role in hiring decisions, their implications often extend beyond just the immediate choice of candidate. These findings can shape both individual careers and the overall reputation of a company. Here are some key impacts you should consider: Hiring Decisions: Negative findings, like criminal records or employment discrepancies, can lead employers to withdraw job offers, especially in sensitive sectors. Disputes: Candidates may challenge inaccuracies in their background checks, which can delay the hiring process. Legal Obligations: Employers must adhere to the adverse action process, allowing candidates to address negative information before final decisions. Company Reputation: The nature of background check findings can affect public perception regarding a company’s commitment to safety and integrity. Understanding these impacts can help you navigate the intricacies of background checks effectively. Best Practices for Employers To guarantee a smooth and efficient hiring process, it’s crucial for employers to adopt best practices for conducting background checks. Start by implementing a consistent process that assigns unique reference numbers to each applicant. This approach streamlines tracking and organization, making it easier to manage records. Ascertain compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) by obtaining written consent from candidates before performing background checks, which may involve referencing their unique identification numbers. Utilize a reliable background check service that efficiently manages these reference numbers, enhancing accuracy in reporting. Furthermore, train your HR staff to understand the importance of reference numbers for maintaining organized records and facilitating the review process during hiring. Finally, regularly review and update your background check policy to incorporate these best practices, assuring both efficiency and compliance in your hiring efforts. Frequently Asked Questions What Information Is Necessary for a Background Check? For a background check, you’ll typically need to provide your full name, date of birth, and Social Security number. This information helps verify your identity and history. Furthermore, you may need to supply previous addresses, employment details, and education information for a thorough review. Remember, legal consent is required under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to guarantee compliance when conducting these checks. Specific industries might’ve extra requirements as well. What Is the Difference Between a Background Check and a Reference Check? A background check focuses on verifying factual information about your criminal history, employment, and education, whereas a reference check assesses your work ethic and interpersonal skills through conversations with former employers. Background checks require your written consent and may include extensive searches, like credit history. Conversely, reference checks are subjective, providing insights into your character and past job performance. Both processes help employers evaluate your qualifications and fit for their organization. What Is a Candidate Reference Number? A candidate reference number is a unique identifier assigned to you during the hiring process. It helps employers and background check Checkr companies track and manage your application efficiently. Typically generated by the applicant tracking system when you submit your application, this number allows you to inquire about your background check status accurately. Keeping your reference number handy guarantees organized records and compliance with background check protocols, streamlining the hiring process for everyone involved. Do Companies Still Require References? Yes, many companies still require references as part of their hiring process. They do this to gain insights into your work ethic, skills, and how well you might fit into their culture. A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management indicates that around 95% of employers conduct reference checks before making decisions. This process is especially critical in sensitive industries like healthcare or finance, where regulatory compliance and safety concerns are paramount. Conclusion In conclusion, during a background check, a reference number isn’t strictly necessary, but possessing one can significantly enhance the process’s efficiency and organization. It serves as a unique identifier, minimizing errors and confusion among all parties involved. Reference numbers additionally provide a clear audit trail, crucial for compliance. By comprehending the role of reference numbers, you can guarantee a smoother background check process, ultimately benefiting both employers and candidates in maintaining accurate and organized records. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Does a Background Check Need a Reference Number?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

When considering a background check, you might wonder if a reference number is necessary. Although it’s not a strict requirement, having one can streamline the process. Reference numbers act as unique identifiers, which helps reduce errors and confusion between candidates, employers, and background check providers. They furthermore guarantee accurate tracking of compliance documentation. Comprehending the role of these numbers is essential, especially when traversing the intricacies of background checks and their implications. What else should you know about the background check process? Key Takeaways A reference number is not mandatory for background checks but is highly beneficial for tracking and organizing candidate screenings. It streamlines communication between employers, background check providers, and candidates, reducing potential errors. Reference numbers create a clear audit trail for compliance documentation in various industries. Using reference numbers helps link relevant data to the correct candidate, enhancing the overall background check process. While optional, incorporating reference numbers can improve efficiency and data integrity in the hiring process. Understanding Background Checks When you apply for a job, comprehending background checks is essential, as they play a significant role in the hiring process. A Maryland background check typically involves verifying your criminal history, employment record, and educational credentials. Employers often conduct a criminal record check MD to assess any possible legal issues that could affect your suitability for the role. This process helps mitigate the risks associated with negligent hiring, guaranteeing a safer workplace for everyone. Before employers initiate a background check, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requires them to obtain your written consent. This guarantees transparency throughout the process. In addition, some employers might conduct a reference check, where they contact your previous employers or colleagues to gather insights about your work ethic and character. Grasping these components can help you prepare for what employers will look for, making you a stronger candidate in the competitive job market. The Role of Reference Numbers Reference numbers play a crucial role in the background check process, serving as unique identifiers for each candidate’s screening. When you initiate a background check, especially a Maryland criminal background check, a reference number is assigned to help track and organize the screening. This number makes it easier for employers and background check companies to manage multiple requests efficiently, allowing quick access to specific candidate information during the hiring process. Using a reference number streamlines communication between employers, background check providers, and candidates, minimizing errors or confusion about applicant records. It’s particularly beneficial in industries that require compliance documentation, as reference numbers provide a clear audit trail for each background check conducted. By using these numbers, employers can easily retrieve and review background check results, ultimately making the hiring decision process more organized and effective. Types of Background Checks Background checks encompass a variety of screenings that help employers assess a candidate’s suitability for a position. One key type is the Maryland criminal background check, which reveals any past legal issues, such as arrests or convictions, that could impact hiring decisions. A criminal history records check in Maryland guarantees thorough investigation into an applicant’s legal past. In addition to criminal checks, employment verification is vital; it confirms the authenticity of job titles, dates of employment, and reasons for leaving previous positions. Education verification adds another layer by validating degrees and certifications claimed by candidates, confirming they meet job qualifications. Finally, a credit history check evaluates an individual’s creditworthiness, which is especially important in roles with financial responsibilities. Together, these checks create a detailed md state background check, enabling employers to make informed hiring decisions. Importance of Accurate Information Accurate information in background checks is crucial for verifying a candidate’s identity and history, which directly impacts your hiring decisions. When you guarantee data accuracy, you minimize the risk of delays, legal issues, and poor hires based on incorrect information. Using reference numbers not just helps in efficiently tracking requests but likewise links relevant data to the right candidate, streamlining the entire process. Ensuring Data Accuracy When you’re conducting background checks, ensuring the information you rely on is accurate is vital for safeguarding your hiring process. An effective Maryland background search requires verifying data to prevent potential hiring risks associated with false or misleading information. A Maryland state criminal background check can reveal disqualifying histories that candidates mightn’t disclose. By maintaining data integrity, you can identify discrepancies that may indicate dishonesty, enhancing your hiring process. Accurate information contributes to efficiency, reducing delays caused by disputes over incorrect data or the need for further verification. Ultimately, ensuring data accuracy protects your organization’s reputation and nurtures trust with candidates, creating a transparent hiring environment fundamental for long-term success. Impact on Hiring Decisions Inaccurate information can greatly skew hiring decisions, leading to costly consequences for your organization. With 30% of job applicants providing false details about their employment history, relying on unverified information can mislead you. A study shows that 75% of employers found discrepancies in candidates’ resumes through background checks, underscoring the need for thorough verification. Conducting detailed background checks not only reduces the risk of negligent hiring lawsuits, which can cost thousands in legal fees but additionally improves workplace safety by identifying candidates with troubling histories. Moreover, accurate background information can enhance overall hire quality, as companies that perform effective screenings experience 50% lower turnover rates, ultimately benefiting your organization’s stability and reputation. How Background Checks Are Conducted Background checks are essential for employers aiming to verify a candidate’s qualifications and background before making hiring decisions. The process typically starts by obtaining consent from the candidate, as mandated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Once consent is secured, specialized companies conduct the checks, utilizing various databases to gather information on criminal history, employment verification, and educational background. Depending on the job requirements and industry regulations, background checks may include searches for criminal records, credit history, and driving records. Employers often establish a clear policy outlining the types of checks performed, ensuring compliance with legal standards throughout the process. Many background check services offer automated systems, streamlining the process and enabling efficient tracking and reporting of results. By following these steps, employers can make informed decisions as they respect candidates’ rights and ensure a fair hiring process. When a Reference Number Is Useful Utilizing a reference number in the background check process can greatly boost efficiency and accuracy for employers. This system allows you and background check companies to track and retrieve specific screening reports tied to individual candidates easily. By implementing reference numbers, you maintain organization and clarity when managing multiple background checks, ensuring that each candidate’s information aligns accurately with their profile. Moreover, reference numbers improve communication between you and background check providers, allowing for quicker resolution of discrepancies or issues that may arise. In industries where regulatory compliance is essential, these numbers create a clear audit trail for each background check conducted, ensuring adherence to legal protocols. Finally, reference numbers help you efficiently manage large volumes of applicant data, greatly reducing the risk of misidentifying candidates or their results. Overall, incorporating reference numbers can streamline your hiring process and boost overall outcomes. Common Misconceptions About Background Checks Misconceptions about background checks can lead to confusion and misinformed decisions during the hiring process. One common belief is that a reference number is necessary, but background checks actually rely on personal details like your name, date of birth, and Social Security number. Many likewise assume that all background checks are uniform; nonetheless, different industries require specific checks based on regulatory needs, particularly in healthcare or finance. Some people think background checks reveal every past behavior, but they only reflect the specific searches conducted and relevant jurisdictions, meaning some records might be inaccessible. Furthermore, it’s a myth that these checks automatically verify all candidate information. Although they can confirm employment and education, gaps in history may not be addressed. Finally, background checks focus on objective data and official records, not subjective assessments of a candidate’s character or work ethic. Comprehending these misconceptions is vital for informed hiring decisions. Differences Between Background and Reference Checks When comparing background checks and reference checks, it’s important to understand their distinct purposes and the types of information they assess. Background checks primarily focus on verifying an applicant’s criminal history, employment, and education, ensuring safety and qualifications. Conversely, reference checks aim to evaluate a candidate’s work ethic, interpersonal skills, and compatibility with company culture, providing insights that are often more subjective. Purpose of Each Check Many employers rely on both background checks and reference checks to make informed hiring decisions, each serving a distinct purpose. Comprehending these differences can guide your hiring strategy effectively. Background Checks: Focus on verifying factual records like criminal history, education, and employment, ensuring workplace safety and compliance. Reference Checks: Assess a candidate’s work ethic and interpersonal skills through insights from previous employers or colleagues. Purpose of Background Checks: Screen out unqualified candidates and protect your brand by identifying potential red flags. Purpose of Reference Checks: Validate candidates’ skills and cultural fit, enhancing the overall hiring decision process. Key Information Assessed Comprehending the key information assessed through background checks and reference checks is vital for effective hiring strategies. Background checks typically investigate an applicant’s criminal history, employment history, educational qualifications, and credentials. These checks verify the accuracy of reported information and reveal any disqualifying criminal records. Conversely, reference checks focus on evaluating an applicant’s work ethic, interpersonal skills, and cultural fit within your organization. They provide insights into past job performance from previous employers or colleagues. Meanwhile, industry regulations often mandate background checks in sectors like healthcare and finance. Reference checks are widely used across all industries. Both checks are fundamental, as background checks improve workplace safety, whereas reference checks help you understand a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. Legal Considerations in Background Checks Legal considerations in background checks play a crucial role in the hiring process, ensuring fairness and compliance with established norms. As an employer or candidate, you need to understand these key points: Written Consent: The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) mandates that employers obtain written consent from candidates before conducting background checks. State Laws: Different states have specific laws governing background checks, including notification and consent requirements, which can vary markedly. Disclosure Requirement: Employers must provide clear disclosure regarding the use of background checks, typically through a separate document. Adverse Action Process: If an employer opts against hiring based on background check information, they must follow an adverse action process, including a pre-adverse action notice to the candidate. Steps to Prepare for a Background Check Preparing for a background check involves several important steps that guarantee compliance and accuracy. First, create a compliant policy outlining your procedures to confirm adherence to regulations like the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Next, obtain written consent from the candidate, as this is legally required before you can initiate any checks. Collect all necessary information from the candidate, including their full name, date of birth, Social Security number, and addresses, which are critical for accurate searches. It’s also important to partner with a reliable background check company experienced in the industry, as this confirms both accuracy and compliance. Furthermore, keep candidates informed throughout the screening process by providing updates on the status of their background check and addressing any potential issues that arise. Following these steps will help streamline the process and maintain transparency, which is essential for building trust with candidates. Impact of Background Check Findings Even though background check findings can play a crucial role in hiring decisions, their implications often extend beyond just the immediate choice of candidate. These findings can shape both individual careers and the overall reputation of a company. Here are some key impacts you should consider: Hiring Decisions: Negative findings, like criminal records or employment discrepancies, can lead employers to withdraw job offers, especially in sensitive sectors. Disputes: Candidates may challenge inaccuracies in their background checks, which can delay the hiring process. Legal Obligations: Employers must adhere to the adverse action process, allowing candidates to address negative information before final decisions. Company Reputation: The nature of background check findings can affect public perception regarding a company’s commitment to safety and integrity. Understanding these impacts can help you navigate the intricacies of background checks effectively. Best Practices for Employers To guarantee a smooth and efficient hiring process, it’s crucial for employers to adopt best practices for conducting background checks. Start by implementing a consistent process that assigns unique reference numbers to each applicant. This approach streamlines tracking and organization, making it easier to manage records. Ascertain compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) by obtaining written consent from candidates before performing background checks, which may involve referencing their unique identification numbers. Utilize a reliable background check service that efficiently manages these reference numbers, enhancing accuracy in reporting. Furthermore, train your HR staff to understand the importance of reference numbers for maintaining organized records and facilitating the review process during hiring. Finally, regularly review and update your background check policy to incorporate these best practices, assuring both efficiency and compliance in your hiring efforts. Frequently Asked Questions What Information Is Necessary for a Background Check? For a background check, you’ll typically need to provide your full name, date of birth, and Social Security number. This information helps verify your identity and history. Furthermore, you may need to supply previous addresses, employment details, and education information for a thorough review. Remember, legal consent is required under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to guarantee compliance when conducting these checks. Specific industries might’ve extra requirements as well. What Is the Difference Between a Background Check and a Reference Check? A background check focuses on verifying factual information about your criminal history, employment, and education, whereas a reference check assesses your work ethic and interpersonal skills through conversations with former employers. Background checks require your written consent and may include extensive searches, like credit history. Conversely, reference checks are subjective, providing insights into your character and past job performance. Both processes help employers evaluate your qualifications and fit for their organization. What Is a Candidate Reference Number? A candidate reference number is a unique identifier assigned to you during the hiring process. It helps employers and background check Checkr companies track and manage your application efficiently. Typically generated by the applicant tracking system when you submit your application, this number allows you to inquire about your background check status accurately. Keeping your reference number handy guarantees organized records and compliance with background check protocols, streamlining the hiring process for everyone involved. Do Companies Still Require References? Yes, many companies still require references as part of their hiring process. They do this to gain insights into your work ethic, skills, and how well you might fit into their culture. A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management indicates that around 95% of employers conduct reference checks before making decisions. This process is especially critical in sensitive industries like healthcare or finance, where regulatory compliance and safety concerns are paramount. Conclusion In conclusion, during a background check, a reference number isn’t strictly necessary, but possessing one can significantly enhance the process’s efficiency and organization. It serves as a unique identifier, minimizing errors and confusion among all parties involved. Reference numbers additionally provide a clear audit trail, crucial for compliance. By comprehending the role of reference numbers, you can guarantee a smoother background check process, ultimately benefiting both employers and candidates in maintaining accurate and organized records. Image via Google Gemini and ArtSmart This article, "Does a Background Check Need a Reference Number?" was first published on Small Business Trends View the full article

Innovation isn’t a spark—it’s a sustained pursuit. Meet Google, Proximity Media, Google, Reddit, Unwell and Tubi—the teams turning bold vision into daily discipline, redefining what it takes to lead, create, and stay ahead. View the full article

Senators are discussing a proposal to end the Homeland Security budget stalemate by funding much of the department, including the Transportation Security Administration airport workers going without pay, but excluding ICE’s enforcement and removal operations that have been core to the dispute. The potential breakthrough came after a group of Republican senators headed to the White House late Monday to meet with President Donald The President. Senators said they expected the negotiators to work through the night hammering out the details and present written proposals for both parties to discuss Tuesday at their weekly caucus lunches. “All I can say is that the discussions have been very positive and productive, and hopefully headed in the right direction,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters late in the evening: “Both sides are working in a serious way.” The sudden shift in the monthlong standoff comes as U.S. airports are jammed with long lines after routine Homeland Security funding was halted, leaving TSA understaffed during the spring travel season. Democrats are refusing to fund Homeland Security without restraints on The President’s immigration enforcement and mass deportation operations after the deaths of two U.S. citizens during ICE protests in Minneapolis. The President took the extraordinary step over the weekend of ordering Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to provide airport security, drawing alarm from some lawmakers that it could escalate tensions. The contours of the deal under consideration would fund most of Homeland Security, but exclude funding for one main part of ICE — the enforcement and removal operations that are core to The President’s deportation agenda. Under the package being floated, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations would be funded as well as Customs and Border Protection, but with new guardrails to position officers from those divisions in their traditional roles, rather than as they have been used more recently in immigration roundups in cities. It would also include a number of changes in immigration operations that Democrats have demanded, including mandating that officers wear body cameras and identification. Since so much of ICE is already funded through The President’s big tax breaks bill, and immigration officers are still receiving paychecks during the partial government shutdown, senators said the new restraints would also be imposed on operations that rely on that funding source, as well. “I’m going to be working through the night,” said Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, a chief negotiator who returned from the White House meeting hopeful they had a solution to “land this plane.” “We’re going to be working diligently,” she said. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who was not part of the group at the White House, said his understanding was that there was a “sense of urgency” coming from the talks. Coons described various choices before the senators at this point — from no money at all for ICE but also no restraints on the agency operations, to fully funding ICE but with more of the restraints Democrats have demanded, to a middle option of funding most of DHS excluding ICE’s enforcement and removal operations. That middle option is what he and other senators understood was broadly on the table after the White House talks. “First step is to get the proposal in writing,” said Sen. Angus King, the Independent from Maine. “I want to see exactly what that means.” Senators late Monday also confirmed Markwayne Mullin as Homeland Security secretary. He takes over for Kristi Noem, who led the department’s immigration enforcement operations that erupted with the public outcry and the funding standoff. Mullin provides a potentially new face for the immigration operation. During his confirmation hearing last week, Mullin touched on another key demand Democrats want — ensuring a judge has signed off on warrants that immigration officers use to search people’s homes, rather than simply relying on administrative warrants issued by the department. “This is significant,” Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said about the progress toward changes. “Noem is gone. That’s a big deal.” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said he was hopeful senators could work things out. “Look, there’s a lot of different variables in the equations,” he said. “I’m hopeful we’ll get there.” Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim contributed to this report. —Lisa Mascaro and Joey Cappelletti, Associated Press View the full article

Zoox, the Amazon-owned autonomous driving company known for its whimsically shaped robotaxis, is expanding to new locations. The company on March 24 announced plans to begin operations in Austin and Miami later this year, while expanding its existing footprint in Las Vegas and San Francisco. In Las Vegas, riders can now access additional locations along the Strip, with service expected to reach the Sphere, T-Mobile Arena, and Harry Reid International Airport. In San Francisco, service will expand this spring to neighborhoods including the Marina, North Beach, Chinatown, and Pacific Heights, as well as along the Embarcadero—more than quadrupling Zoox’s current footprint in the city. The expansion comes with technical upgrades, including machine learning model updates aimed at smoother rides and more accurate arrival time estimates. Regular software improvements have helped to enable service in new areas as the vehicles become more capable, says cofounder and CTO Jesse Levinson. “For example, in San Francisco, our new geofence includes steeper hills, more dense traffic, places where you have to make more assertive lane changes,” he says. The cars have also gained the ability to operate in fog and rain, which will help in the push into Miami. For now, Zoox’s distinctive electric vehicles—featuring inward-facing seats and no driver’s seat or steering wheel—operate under a regulatory exemption from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that allows them to run free rides. The company is still applying for a separate exemption that would allow it to charge for service, Levinson says. Its fleet remains relatively small, growing from about 75 to roughly 100 prototype vehicles as part of the expansion. That is expected to change once Zoox begins mass-manufacturing the production version of its vehicles at its plant in Hayward, California. The company hopes to start later this year and eventually produce three vehicles per hour, enabling a significant increase in fleet size. Alphabet-owned Waymo reportedly has at least 2,500 automated vehicles in service. “A bit later in the year, when we start producing our production vehicles, you’ll start to see significant expansion in the size of our fleet in the cities we operate,” Levinson says. Anyone can currently request a free ride via the Zoox app in Las Vegas, though wait times can be long due to limited vehicle availability and the lack of fares. In San Francisco, riders must join a waitlist, which already includes several hundred-thousand people. In addition to its custom-built vehicles, Zoox operates a testing fleet of retrofitted SUVs staffed with human safety drivers. These vehicles map and test new cities ahead of launching automated taxi service. In early March, the company announced test deployments in Dallas and Phoenix, joining markets including Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. The test fleet has been operating in Austin and Miami since mid-2024, the company says. Zoox also announced a partnership with Uber that would allow Uber customers in Las Vegas and Los Angeles to be matched with Zoox vehicles. The rollout is expected to begin this summer in Las Vegas—likely after the company is cleared to charge for rides, Levinson says—and in mid-2027 in Los Angeles. Riders will still be able to book directly through the Zoox app, but the partnership gives Zoox access to Uber’s large customer base, including those who may not want to download another ride-hailing app. “We will continue to offer the Zoox app in all of our cities,” Levinson says. “But we have started to explore what a partnership with Uber could look like, starting in those two cities, and I think we’ll both learn a lot from each other.” Zoox is also rolling out new features aimed at improving convenience and comfort. A “Find My Zoox” option will allow passengers to customize lighting and trigger blinking lights on their vehicle, making it easier to spot in crowded areas. Riders will also be able to pair their devices with in-vehicle Bluetooth audio and automatically reconnect on future trips, Levinson says. The vehicles already support music playback from prebuilt playlists. Competition in the ride-hailing market appears poised to heat up, with Waymo also expanding to new markets, Elon Musk touting plans for automated Tesla taxis, and Uber recently announcing a separate deal to invest up to $1.25 billion in electric vehicle maker Rivian as part of its robotaxi plan. But Levinson says he imagines Zoox’s lead time in creating custom-built autonomous cars will give it an edge on rival operators. Still, Levinson argues that Zoox’s early focus on custom-built autonomous vehicles could provide an advantage. “As other companies might try to come out with their first purpose-built robotaxi, we might be on our second or third iteration,” he says. “Hopefully, those learnings will continue to allow us to have a meaningful benefit for our customers.” View the full article

A giant cheesesteak running through multiple terminals at the Philadelphia airport might not solve the world’s problems, but it will make people smile. It’s National Cheesesteak Day, after all, so a little joy is necessary. In honor of this unique day, here’s some history on this lesser-known holiday. We even threw in some ideas on how to celebrate and make Rocky Balboa proud. Brief history of the Philly cheesesteak The cheesesteak is an American invention that originated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The desire for something new struck two Italian-American brothers, Pat and Henry Olivieri, one day in 1930. The brothers ran a hot dog cart, but were craving some beef. They grilled that up with onions and put it on a bun. The result was the first cheesesteak, even though dairy wouldn’t be added until 1940 (thanks to “Cocky Joe” Lorenza). The hot dog cart quickly turned into a restaurant called Pat’s King of Steaks. In the 1960s, competitors such as Geno’s, Dalessandro’s Steaks, and Jim’s Steak opened up, further cementing the sandwich into the cultural zeitgeist. Suddenly, everyone in the city had a strong opinion on which establishment was the best. Perhaps the best publicity for the cheesesteak came in 1976. In the classic film Rocky, Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) ordered the “whiz wit” at Pat’s. The world would want what he was having. What’s in a cheesesteak? At its core, a cheesesteak is beef, onions, and a roll. There are many variations of this. The beef can be sliced or chopped. You can order it “wit” or “witout,” meaning with or without the grilled onions. Cheese is another personal preference. Most people prefer either Whiz or melted American or provolone. No matter which you choose, this is a messy meal which requires lots of napkins, and inventive leaning to avoid spilling on your clothes. How did National Cheesesteak Day come about? Although nobody can know for certain, four high school friends in Philadelphia might have started this unofficial holiday when celebrating their upcoming high school graduation. On March 24, 1994, buddies Sean Mealey, John McGrath, Jeremy Hollis, and Ted Goldberg enjoyed a terrific day at Stoxy’s Steaks. These young adults wanted to keep the tradition going after moving away for college. They wrote letters, recruited new friends, and even made a website. Years passed, and somehow March 24 became the day everyone celebrated the cheesesteak. How is the Philadelphia airport celebrating National Cheesesteak Day in 2026? The Philly airport is going big this year, potentially bigger than ever before. Its PHL Food & Shops and the City of Philadelphia Department of Aviation are partnering up to break the Record for the “Longest Line of Cheesesteaks.” In the spirit of brotherly love, every restaurant at the airport that has a cheesesteak on the menu will participate. This huge cheesesteak is expected to span both terminals B and C. National Cheesesteak Day deals, discounts, and freebies But the best way to celebrate is through your stomach. If you find yourself in Philadelphia on the big day, there’s a showdown in the Northeast at the Metro by T-Mobile store on Cottman Avenue. More than ten restaurants will be offering samples to attendees, who can vote on their favorites. Participants include Del Rossi’s, Skinny Joey’s, Pat’s King of Steaks, Woodrow’s, Cafe Carmela, Campo’s Philly Cheesesteak, Cleaver’s, Stella’s, Verona Pizza, LaNova and Lucatelli’s. Beyond Philly, Capriotti is offering a buy one, get one half off deal. Grab a friend and chow down. Hot Table is offering its small cheesesteak paninis for only $5 in store only. Philly’s Best is offering $2 off its cooper classic cheesesteak from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Texadelphianation is doing a buy one, get one free deal—another great opportunity for friends. And, New Yorkers, rejoice! G’s Cheesesteaks at 6 Avenue B 10009 is offering free cheesesteaks from 1 to 3 p.m., according to its Instagram account. After your stomach is satisfied, turn on Rocky to put a cherry on top of your National Cheesesteak Day celebrations—as the character points out, even the big man himself gets hungry. View the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. One of the more practical early deals in Amazon’s Spring Sale is the Amazon Fire TV Stick HD, now $16.99 (originally $34.99). That works out to about 51% off and marks its lowest price so far, according to price trackers. PCMag gave it an “outstanding” rating and called it the best 1080p media hub, which fits with how it performs—it doesn’t offer high-end specs but focuses on making an older TV feel current again without asking you to spend much. Amazon Fire TV Stick HD Media streaming hub $16.99 at Amazon $34.99 Save $18.00 Get Deal Get Deal $16.99 at Amazon $34.99 Save $18.00 This is the kind of device you buy when your TV still works fine but the built-in apps feel slow or outdated. You plug the stick into the HDMI port, connect it to power, and you are up and running in a few minutes. The remote keeps things simple. The remote keeps things simple. It has quick buttons for apps like Netflix and Prime Video, and it can control your TV’s volume and power, which means you are not reaching for a second remote every time. Alexa is built in, letting you press a button to search for a movie, open an app, or control compatible smart home devices. It feels easy to live with, especially if you just want something that works without much setup. In everyday use, it does what most people need from a media streamer. You can stream from all the major apps, and 1080p playback with HDR10 looks good on a Full HD screen. If you have a compatible soundbar or TV, it can pass through Dolby Atmos audio as well. The trade-off is performance. The interface can lag a bit when switching between menus, and it may take a moment to load larger libraries. It also sticks with Wi-Fi 5 and skips features like AirPlay or Google Cast, so it is not the most flexible option if you rely on those. If you are upgrading a main TV or want something faster, the 4K models make more sense. But for a bedroom TV, a guest room, or anything still running at 1080p, this gets the job done at a price that is hard to argue with. Our Best Editor-Vetted Amazon Big Spring Sale Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $149.00 (List Price $179.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Sony WH1000XM6- Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones — $398.00 (List Price $459.99) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Ring Indoor Cam Plus 2K Wired Security Camera (White) — $39.99 (List Price $59.99) Fire TV Stick 4K Max Streaming Player With Remote — $34.99 (List Price $59.99) Amazon Kindle Colorsoft 16GB 7" eReader (Black) — $169.99 (List Price $249.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

Multi-manager firm weighs destinations after requests from staff to relocateView the full article

Egan-Jones has come under scrutiny for its ratings on thousands of private loans relied on by insurersView the full article

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication. Amazon’s Spring Sale officially runs from March 25 through March 31, but a few early deals are already live, and some are worth paying attention to. One of them is the Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS + Cellular, 46mm) in a Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band (M/L), now $429 (down from $529), which is its lowest price yet according to price trackers. If you prefer something dressier, the gold titanium version with a Milanese loop is also a $100 off, down to $699 from $799. Amazon is also testing one-hour and three-hour delivery in select locations, as reported by our senior tech editor Jake Peterson, so depending on where you live, you might not be waiting long once you hit buy. Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS + Cellular, 46mm) Jet Black Aluminum Case with Black Sport Band (M/L) $429.00 at Amazon $529.00 Save $100.00 Get Deal Get Deal $429.00 at Amazon $529.00 Save $100.00 The Series 11 doesn’t try to overhaul what Apple already settled with the Series 10, in terms of design. Instead, this smartwatch leans into small upgrades that show up in everyday use. Battery life now reaches 24 hours, finally moving past the long-standing 18-hour ceiling, which means you can track sleep without planning your charging schedule around it. The display gets brighter too, hitting 2,000 nits, so it stays readable outdoors, and Apple’s Ion-X glass helps with visibility at off angles. It’s also tougher this time, with better scratch resistance, IP6X dust protection, and WR50 water resistance for swimming. And with the cellular version, you now get 5G connectivity, which makes leaving your phone behind more realistic for runs or quick errands. There are also software additions like background hypertension alerts and a Sleep Score, although some of those aren’t exclusive to this model. PCMag gave the Series 11 an “outstanding” rating and named it one of the best Apple Watch to buy in 2026, noting that its performance and health features remain among the best available. This is an easy upgrade if you’re coming from a Series 7 or 8, where the battery bump alone changes how you use the watch. If you’re on a Series 10, however, the case is weaker—unless you care about incremental improvements or the new cellular capabilities, especially when you consider how it compares in size and durability to Apple’s higher-end model in this breakdown of the Apple Watch Series 11 against the Ultra 3. If you do pick it up, it’s worth learning how to get more out of it with our guides and hacks for every Apple Watch user, since the hardware is only part of the experience. Our Best Editor-Vetted Amazon Big Spring Sale Deals Right Now Apple AirPods 4 Active Noise Cancelling Wireless Earbuds — $149.00 (List Price $179.00) Apple iPad 11" 128GB A16 WiFi Tablet (Blue, 2025) — $299.00 (List Price $349.00) Sony WH1000XM6- Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones — $398.00 (List Price $459.99) Apple Watch Series 11 (GPS, 42mm, S/M Black Sport Band) — $299.00 (List Price $399.00) Blink Video Doorbell Wireless (Newest Model) + Sync Module Core — $35.99 (List Price $69.99) Ring Indoor Cam Plus 2K Wired Security Camera (White) — $39.99 (List Price $59.99) Fire TV Stick 4K Max Streaming Player With Remote — $34.99 (List Price $59.99) Amazon Kindle Colorsoft 16GB 7" eReader (Black) — $169.99 (List Price $249.99) Deals are selected by our commerce team View the full article

TruLookup for Real Estate reduces the need for realtors to access multiple databases or download numerous apps when researching a potential client or property. View the full article

If you’re one of the legion of iPhone fans who can’t wait for the next major software update and all the new features it will bring, there’s some good news. Apple has revealed when you’ll be able to get a look at the iPhone’s next operating system, iOS 27—and you won’t have to wait much longer. Here’s what you need to know. Apple announces the dates for WWDC26 Apple has revealed when it will hold its next Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The conference, affectionately referred to as “dub-dub” by Apple employees, is one of Apple’s two major events throughout the year, and one of the tech industry’s most important. WWDC is an annual week-long event where Apple previews the next major versions of its operating systems to developers and the public for the first time. These are the operating systems that will ship on Apple’s new iPhones and other devices come the fall, and include iOS for the iPhone, macOS for the Mac, iPadOS for the iPad, tvOS for the Apple TV, and more. Yesterday, Apple revealed the dates for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, dubbed WWDC26. The event will run from Monday, June 8, to Friday, June 12. But the most important date is June 8, when Apple will hold its annual software keynote. This keynote will be the first time the public will get a look at the next major versions of all of Apple’s operating systems, including the upcoming iOS 27 for iPhone. iOS 27 may be a ‘less is more’ update Usually, Apple’s major software updates are packed with new features, visual tweaks, or outright overhauls. For example, last year at WWDC25, Apple showed off iOS 26 and its Liquid Glass visual design refresh for the first time—a major shift in the way iOS looked and operated. Yet rumors suggest that this year’s iOS 27 update may be more subdued than prior years when it comes to new features. Instead, Apple is rumored to be using iOS 27 to focus on little refinements and bug fixes across the operating system. As a result, many are referring to iOS 27 as a “Snow Leopard”-like release. Snow Leopard was the product name for the 10.6 version of Mac OS X that Apple released in 2009. The release was different from prior versions of OS X because Apple chose not to introduce many new features, focusing instead on bug fixes and OS refinement. As a result, even to this day, Snow Leopard was one of the most stable and beloved operating system updates Apple ever put out. In recent years, many iPhone users have lamented that iOS has become bloated and buggy as Apple prioritized features over stability. And so the possibility of a “Snow Leopard” like iOS 27 is extremely appealing to many longtime Apple users. Of course, that’s not to say iOS 27 won’t have any new features—but they are expected to be fewer than with previous releases. Specifically, the major new feature of iOS 27 is expected to be a chatbot like Siri powered by Google’s Gemini LLM. Indeed, in its WWDC26 announcement, Apple said this year’s conference will show off “AI advancements,” likely referring to the new Siri chatbot. When can I download iOS 27? While Apple has all but explicitly confirmed it will show off iOS 27 to the public on June 8, users will have to wait a little longer to actually install the new software on their iPhones. When Apple first previews a new iOS at WWDC, it releases a beta of the new operating system to developers the same day. This means if you are a developer, you’ll be able to get your hands on iOS 27 on June 8. But if you’re a general user, you’ll need to wait longer. About a month after Apple releases the first developer beta of the new iOS, the company releases a public beta. This beta is for members of the general public who want to test the new iOS as soon as possible. However, the public iOS beta isn’t a finished product and may have incomplete features and bugs. That’s why many just prefer to wait until the final release of the new iOS. That release usually happens in the fall, shortly after Apple’s second major event of the year: its iPhone launch event. If you plan to wait until then to install iOS 27 on your iPhone, you can expect to be able to do so around the middle of September. View the full article

Redemption requests across industry surge as exodus of wealthy individuals acceleratesView the full article

One minute he threatens death and destruction, the next he says the US and Iran are engaged in negotiationsView the full article

Fintech, where Peter Mandelson and Harvey Schwartz were board members, is given £2mn penalty by Bank of EnglandView the full article

Taking stock of the once red-hot agtech sector, analysts have called 2025 a “transition year,” a polite way of saying crop prices slid, Bayer traded near a 20-year low, John Deere reported less than half of its 2023 income, and almost two dozen startups in once-frothy areas like indoor farming, drones, and insect-based ingredients collapsed. It was enough for a managing director of ag giant Syngenta’s VC arm to jokingly “thank God” it had avoided investing in alt-protein, carbon credits, and vertical farming—though he allowed that the downturn offered “good lessons” for smart entrepreneurs eyeing “a second wave.” Fast Company’s 2026 list of the most innovative companies in agriculture attempts to identify those already riding it. Crunching two decades of data, Advancing Eco Agriculture introduced the first AI trained on regenerative farming techniques. Farmers can upload field tests or photos of diseased crops, then ask: What now? Canada-based Thunderstruck Ag achieved a breakout year for its one-of-a-kind model, bringing to market the simple solutions to industry problems that farmers have devised in their own fields or workshops. In just two years, soil-health company Holganix has clocked a tenfold increase in the use of its natural soil additive, building what may be the country’s largest regenerative agriculture program, and created a marketplace where customers’ hard-earned sustainability outcomes are sold as tradable assets. Little Leaf Farms sprouted into the U.S.’s top lettuce producer at a time when higher-funded rivals failed. Area 2 Farms, built to scale inside America’s glut of empty urban buildings, explains that previously high-flying startups withered because they eschewed time-tested growing practices in order to erect “vegetable data centers.” Speaking of centuries-old practices, the Ben Franklin-era Old Farmer’s Almanac had one of its best years ever. In other corners, established heavyweights turned familiarity on its head. Dyson debuted a line of strawberries grown how you’d expect from the vacuum brand: rotating on a futuristic Ferris wheel-like contraption that ensures even sunlight. At Bactery, a scientist invented a $30 bacteria-powered battery that’s capable of operating field-input devices for three decades. By gamifying its slaughterhouse meat-cutting process, Cargill says it has added a million pounds of food to American plates during a beef shortage. And Fed by Blue, an offshoot of the international Blue Food Coalition, used a lavishly produced TV series and celebrity-studded events to make mindfulness around sustainable seafood feel aspirational. 1. Holganix For expanding beyond its much-used soil-health test to let farmers sell their sustainability efforts as an asset One of many soil-health startups to spring up in recent years, Holganix stands out by pairing its natural soil additive (Bio 800+) with a simple digital app that plots real-time improvements in soil samples. The combination has driven a tenfold increase in use over two years. Acres treated with Holganix products grew from 300,000 in 2023 to 3 million in 2025—roughly the size of three Rhode Islands—lifting revenue from $16 million to $70 million and making it one of the fastest-growing regenerative agriculture programs in the U.S. The app may not sound particularly sophisticated in the AI era, but in some ways, that was deliberate. Studies show that the biggest barriers to adopting regenerative practices are their perceived complexity and the unclear return on investment. Holganix is trying to target both: simplicity through a streamlined app tracking system and profitability through something it calls Thrive Acres, a platform launched in 2025 enabling farmers to sell verified outcomes (fertilizer reductions, water savings, carbon sequestration) as tradable assets to corporate buyers. A portion of each sale is reinvested in the community where the asset was generated. The company has also launched an ambitious soil-mapping effort. In the past 12 months, Holganix completed about 350,000 soil-health tests, with another 850,000 planned by mid-spring 2026. Combined with satellite imagery, the data will form what Holganix says is the most detailed view yet of the soil’s “root zone,” giving farmers clearer metrics for how the land responds to regenerative practices. 2. Thunderstruck Ag For inventing an adjustable thresher that helps farmers without overcomplicating things Years ago, fueled by Fireball and Coors Light, two farmers and their uncle torched holes in a tractor wheel that kept clogging with mud, a crude fix so effective, it still gets copied today. That MacGyvered farm solution became Thunderstruck Ag’s first product—the MudSmith—and established its playbook: Partner with farmers who’ve fixed problems but need help scaling their inventions. Today, Thunderstruck—founded 13 years ago by Jeremy Matuszewski, who back then had never set foot on a farm—scours North America for farmer-inventors with simple analog innovations, helps them patent their ideas, then brings them to market. 2025 was the small company’s breakout year: Matuszewski released his own invention, the first directly from the Canada-based company, called the Razors Edge Concaves. Concaves are the curved grates on a combine that separate grain from unused plant material. Previously, farmers have had to swap these heavy plates by hand to move between crop types; the Razors Edge simply self-adjusts on the fly. Thunderstruck says that the machine increases harvest speed by 25%, while slashing fuel consumption by up to 40%. It sold a half million dollars of preorders before the first units even got built. The success accelerated Thunderstruck’s international ambitions. An unexpected trade show visit to Brazil turned into full operations there six months later, with a local team adapting the company’s unconventional sales approach. Matuszewski says that the business philosophy remains unchanged: “Growers don’t need more complexity,” just “solutions that work under pressure.” 3. Little Leaf Farms For building an indoor romaine empire In a year when high-flying vertical farming got steamrolled (SoftBank-backed Plenty declared bankruptcy, Bowery Farming ceased operations, and AeroFarms closed a key facility), Little Leaf Farms went on a tear. The company became the nation’s leading indoor leafy-greens brand, expanded to more than 8,000 stores, and built the world’s largest greenhouse for greens, a 40-acre campus in Pennsylvania. It also broke ground on a new Tennessee site that will open at 20 acres, with the potential to swell to 80. In produce sections, Little Leaf also introduced a pesticide-free, no-wash romaine that it says represents the only “teen” leaf romaine on the market—a lettuce that is neither baby romaine nor fully mature, but rather a Goldilocks variety prized for larger leaves without sacrificing crunch. Its store footprint expanded across the Ahold Delhaize empire to additional Food Lion, Stop & Shop, and Giant locations, as well as to Albertsons stores in the Midwest and South, doubling the sales growth that Little Leaf saw over the previous six months. Little Leaf now controls 54% of the indoor-lettuce market, making it the fastest-growing packaged salad brand in the U.S., even when measured against field-grown competitors. 4. Cargill For using computer vision to maximize meat yield Cargill invested in a tool that essentially gamifies frontline meat carving to squeeze more usable beef from every carcass. Using computer vision, the system tracks cuts made by Cargill’s army of slaughterhouse workers as they break animals down into rib eyes, sirloins, flank steaks, and ground beef. After each cut, workers receive an instant red, yellow, or green emoji performance grade. The world’s largest commodities trader believes that if this technology, dubbed CarVe (short for Cargill Vision Engineering), boosts red-meat yield by even 1%, it could translate into a million additional meals per year. Before CarVe, yield data at Cargill’s plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado—which slaughters 4,000 cows every 24 hours—lagged by a full day. The $90 million system is part of a broader $200 million “Operations of the Future” initiative spanning 1,000 facilities globally. This program includes other ideas applauded by the industry, such as creating natural antioxidants that can slow beef oxidation and extend freshness, alongside some unlikelier-sounding ones, like feeding surplus chocolate to livestock. At Fort Morgan, real-time AI feedback has fine-tuned the old system while improving workplace safety and, Cargill believes, motivating higher performance. 5. Dyson Farming For applying its engineering wizardry to supermarket strawberries Dyson makes peerless vacuums and unrivaled hair dryers. Fresh berries? it’s now fabricating those too. James Dyson turned his attention to farming back in the mid-2010s because he saw agriculture as an arena where sophisticated machinery ought to be improving things—and he harbored a philosophy that his native country, United Kingdom, should be capable of feeding itself. Today, Dyson Farming has channeled its namesake’s ingenuity into a vertical farm in Lincolnshire, in the British countryside. The facility’s crown jewel is a high-tech glass enclosure, just over a year and a half old, that the team now farms in. Inside, they tweak things in real time as one might expect from the company. The space houses a novel rotating growing system that spins the berry plants around a center axis like they’re riding a Ferris wheel, so they can receive equal sunlight each day. Dyson says that yields are 250% higher than those under conventional farming methods. Strawberries have been growing on-site since 2021, but thanks to recent upgrades, Dyson was able to realize James Dyson’s dream of helping feed his fellow Brits: Its first indoor-grown berries hit U.K. grocery shelves last summer. In August, the company announced it had started combining both its farming and beauty businesses through a new line of Omega haircare products that incorporate sunflower oil harvested from the Lincolnshire farm. 6. Advancing Eco Agriculture For putting regenerative-ag AI in farmers’ hands The top user of FieldLark—the first AI trained on regenerative ag, released last summer—is not its creator, Advancing Eco Agriculture CEO John Kempf. That honor goes to a farmer named Dave, who ranches 15,000 acres in Australian cattle country. Past owners of that land used conventional practices that had depleted the soil, and Dave told Advancing Eco Agriculture that, when they contacted him, he felt local agronomists’ fixes were too “cookie-cutter.” He queried ChatGPT, which spit out wrong livestock feed ratios. FieldLark, however, could manage a string of 50 questions without a problem, a discovery that later prompted Dave to joke that maybe he should get offline. AEA built FieldLark around the idea that regenerative agronomy has grown too complex. It taps into the company’s reservoir of lab tests, expert input, and 20 years of fieldwork from 10,000 farms covering 4 million acres. Farmers can ask questions ranging from the general (“How does selenium affect forage protein content?”) to the highly specific (“How do I remove rhizoctonia from my potatoes in this corner of the Great Plains?”). They can get instant analysis of field photos or plant sap tests. To limit hallucinations, FieldLark is cut off from the internet and relies solely on AEA’s curated research. Like other AIs, FieldLark has a free tier, though a paid subscription level will soon add perks such as a portal for field-specific data. Six weeks after launch, it had over 4,000 users worldwide. That base has grown by nearly 50%, with farmers submitting six figures’ worth of queries so far. One reported that the subscription paid for itself for eight years with a single week of yield improvements. 7. Fed by Blue For promoting a sea change in marine conservation via high-profile partnerships with the James Beard Foundation, Andrew Zimmern, PBS, Eric Ripert, and more In 2025, a PBS series that treated fishing supply chain innovations as stories of human ingenuity became the centerpiece of a nationwide run of live events. Guests in 47 cities ate, talked, and mingled with local chefs, fish producers, and celebrities. Seafood companies that got involved saw their own sales increase by as much as 78%, while the project earned an Emmy nomination and a James Beard Impact Award, shifting how sustainable aquaculture enters the public conversation. Hope in the Water, as the series was called, was created by a nonprofit called Fed by Blue. It is an outgrowth of the Aquatic Blue Food Coalition, a global effort spanning 40-plus governments and NGOs, that has parlayed conscientiousness around ocean-friendly seafood into something that can be cool, as opposed to rules you simply try not to violate. Fed by Blue has spent the past year introducing these same ideas to a half-million U.S. classrooms, aiming to create a generation of “blue food–literate” young people through toolkits that present seafood as not just food but the result of climate, communities, and traditions being intertwined. These notions are also finding better footing in kitchens. Last fall’s The Blue Food Cookbook, by Andrew Zimmern, was the first book by a major publisher to combine seafood recipes with a guide for how to protect the ocean and ethically consume from it. It addresses questions like “How do you shuck an oyster?” alongside more expansive ones, such as “Is industrial aquaculture sustainable?” 8. Area 2 Farms For growing fresh produce in empty urban spaces, not far from consumers Acting on the motto “Move the farm, not the food,” Area 2 Farms is working to transform America’s glut of vacant urban buildings into modular vertical farms, growing crops within a few miles of consumers. The company’s first Silo, in Fairfax, Virginia, occupies a structure that sat empty for 20 years. It offers boxes of greens, herbs, and other produce starting at $35 a week, and the grand design is to put one within 10 miles of 90% of Americans. Area 2 Farms, which will open another growing facility in Virginia soon, constructs each Silo according to local demand, adding additional locations as needed, rather than building massive centralized facilities that CEO Oren Falkowitz dismisses as “vegetable data centers.” He sees that error made by Bowery Farms, Square Roots, and others—players now facing a “brutal correction” after investing millions in up-front capital to compete in an industry with onionskin-thin margins. Area 2 Farms’ soil-dependent Silos, by contrast, can grow a far wider range of vegetables—tomatoes, potatoes, turnips, leeks, onions—at costs much closer to a local CSAs. The approach tackles inefficiencies in U.S. food distribution. Fresh produce typically travels 1,500 miles to reach consumers, losing nutritional value along the way. Area 2 Farms’ crops travel just 3.1 miles on average. The Fairfax Silo has sold 100% of its harvest for 150 straight weeks, delivering more than 20,000 harvests to date. The company recently raised $9 million to expand to 10 new farms across Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in 2026. 9. The Old Farmer’s Almanac For offering today’s farmers what all the modern gadgetry can’t: a community, a tie to the past, and a sense of humor In December, at the age of 208, Farmers’ Almanac succumbed to the digital age. But The Old Farmer’s Almanac, founded even earlier—while George Washington was president—did not. Still wrapped in the same yellow cover and calligraphy it’s used since 1794, it actually logged one of its strongest years. Both publications survived the collapse of American agrarian life, the rise of the National Weather Service, and the invention of smartphone weather apps. But Old Farmer’s, America’s oldest continuously published periodical, has charted a novel course: helping home gardeners work in the present. In more recent years, it’s applied its “pleasant degree of humor” to food preservation, how-to guides, and gardening tools, while building a community where readers trade tips, learn canning, browse hundreds of recipes, and buy online soil-test kits, seeds, and Japanese gardening knives. At a time when media focused on modern culture—Guitar Player, Teen Vogue, Game Informer, MTV—have crashed, the idea that an almanac could be thriving feels scandalous. Yet in 2025, the print Old Farmer’s sold out, forcing a second 135,000-copy run. Its Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook hit an eighth reprint with 350,000 copies sold. The brand’s garden-planning app topped its category for North America, newsletter subscriptions grew 20% to 684,000, and it captured 95% of all “almanac” web searches. The year’s biggest challenge may have been convincing people it wasn’t going anywhere. “As sure as the Sun will rise,” editors wrote at year-end, laying out 2026’s expansion, Old Farmer’s “will be around for generations to come.” 10. Bactery For creating a soil-powered battery for precision-ag sensors Bacteries are batteries powered by bacteria. The rise of precision ag has put roughly a quarter billion sensors on farms worldwide, most of them depending on single-use batteries or complex solar setups. Bactery’s alternative—known in science as a microbial fuel cell—generates power by capturing electrons that are released when bacteria break down organic soil matter. In one year, a single Bactery produces the energy equivalent of 10 AA batteries, about twice what’s needed to power common Wi-Fi-enabled farm devices like soil moisture gauges, weather stations, and irrigation valves. The unit embeds into soil with only its cap exposed, and requires no maintenance or supporting infrastructure. It costs about $30, and the company says it’s designed to last 30 years, needs no light, works in any climate, emits zero carbon, and over its lifetime is roughly 5,000 times cheaper than solar. U.K.-based Bactery spun out of a University of Bath lab in 2019 and rebranded under its current name a year and a half ago. After testing prototypes powering water purification systems in remote Brazilian villages, the company deployed units on 50 farms across England and prepared for a commercial product launch last year. It has secured funding from SVG Ventures, the British government’s U.K. Research and Innovation, and SOSV, and is finalizing partnerships with agtech firms, energy providers, and government agencies backing soil energy as the next frontier in clean power. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Traditional economic development tends to focus on investments made and jobs created. For this year’s group of Most Innovative Companies—or in many cases, foundations or governments, in this case—the key performance indicator isn’t dollars spent, but connections made. Growth comes not from directing resources, but finding a better way to nurture what you already have. Governments found creative ways to unleash the potential of their residents, workers, and civil servants. The state of New Mexico, for example, made a first-in-the-nation move to subsidize childcare for all, giving working parents and families a leg up. In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act offered a pathway for low-income residents to electrify homes and cut their bills, while the San Diego Unified School District used one of their underutilized assets—land—to help launch an effort to build thousands of units of housing for their staff. And in St. Louis, the Arts Place Initiative eases the path towards owning a place to live for local artists, giving creativity a new home. Other organizations took a different approach to preserving local economics. Surfing nonprofit Save the Waves started the study of “surfonomics” and launched an insurance product to protect local economies built around key breaks. The Next California, an effort by the World Wildlife Foundation, seeded an agricultural shift in the Mississippi Delta, offering farmers a new opportunity amid a changing climate. And Brazil’s re.green tapped AI and high tech to restore Amazon rainforests, in part by bringing back sustainable, profitable hardwood harvests. Sometimes, the best impact comes from simply bridging a gap. Ox Delivers, which makes electric trucks for shipping goods in rural Africa, gives small businesses a better route to market (and money). Nevada’s Lithium Loop initiative seeks to build a full-circle mining, processing and development pipeline to make batteries in the U.S. And the new Greater Futures Scholarship Fund from the Greater Hartford Gives Foundation offers a more comprehensive model of college scholarships hoping to give students a real leg up on getting into, and graduating from, college. 1. State of New Mexico For making one of the most stubborn and trying costs for working parents disappear From San Francisco to New York City, municipal support for subsidized childcare have become a buzzed-about big city policy. In New Mexico, the goal of universal childcare has already been achieved, addressing a key pillar of the affordability problem plaguing families and helping working parents get some breathing room. In the words of a state official, it’s “putting families at the center of your policymaking.” Starting last November, every New Mexican family qualified for free, subsidized childcare, funded by an Early Childhood Trust Fund, currently paid for by oil and gas revenue. That’s a huge deal: it’s estimated that families in New Mexico spend $12,000 on average every year for childcare, and families nationwide can spend up to 16% of their income on childcare for a single child, according to the department of labor. In New Mexico, everyone qualifies, and the state helps support the increased demand by subsidizing higher wages for childcare workers. New Mexico also plans to invest in more than 1,000 child care sites to build out the infrastructure to support the program. Early results look promising. In the first month, about 7,000 children from 6,000 families enrolled in the program, 63% of whom were eligible but wouldn’t have qualified before, and more than 1,300 childcare providers received subsidies. 2. The Next California/WWF For supporting food safety and food systems while supercharging the Mississippi delta agricultural economy The long-term toll of climate change is expected to hit farms hard, as flooding, drought, and extreme heat and weather collude to challenge any notion of agricultural certainty. To get ahead of that disruption to the food system, the World Wildlife Foundation decided to not just look at what is being lost, but what can be created. The Next California Initiative, a years-long vision to transform the mid-Mississippi Delta and bring new commodity crops to the region, hopes to literally and figuratively seed a new era of agriculture. By 2034, backers hope, 3% of the region’s crop will be more high value fruits, nuts, and specialty grains. In partnership with local agriculture organizations, the WWF has spent years developing plans for spreading new crops across the region and laying the roadmap for new markets and logistics networks for growers. So far, a handful of pilots have been launched as part of the final phase of the project; for instance, switching to more profitable, specialty rices. In the years to come, the initiative hopes to set a template for climate resiliency and economic vibrancy. Three percent may seem small, but research shows that change could bring $3.2 billion more revenue to area farmers. 3. San Diego Unified School District For shoring up public education by making housing more affordable for teachers For teachers trying to work in downtown districts while paying increasingly high rents, the math often doesn’t add up. In California, ground zero for the nation’s affordability crisis, at least a third of educators are rent-burdened and struggle to pay for housing. Late in 2025, San Diego’s school district decided if the city’s costly housing market wasn’t making room for teachers and other district employees, they would. School leadership announced they would be utilizing the district’s own unused properties to create 1,500 units of affordable housing. The plan calls for building housing on land that will stay in San Diego Unified School District hands, and offering more options for educators to cut the cost of living. Some of the proposed projects will include childcare centers, a further boost for working parents. “Building affordable housing, and the district retaining ownership of the land to collect annual lease revenue, strengthens our schools and the surrounding San Diego neighborhoods,” said Superintendent Fabi Bagula. The school district has committed to building long term and based on the proposals in the works, would receive $504 million in revenue over the 99-year lease terms of these developments. 4. Greater Hartford Gives Foundation For creating a scholarship program that addresses higher education’s increasingly high cost Investing in education, long seen as the pathway to brighter futures and better outcomes, feels more like an investment than ever these days, considering the rising costs of college and for most, student loan debt. The average tuition has doubled in the last 30 years, and that’s not counting the rising cost of student housing. Roughly a third of college students in the past year have considered dropping out due to financial burdens. The Greater Hartford Gives Foundation decided it was time that the concept of a scholarship evolved. The Connecticut nonprofit’s new Greater Futures Scholarship Program, in partnership with Hartford Promise, aims to be a more realistic, and holistic, means of supporting higher education. Students at Greater Hartford public schools will receive generous financial support—up to $100,000 over the course of four years—as well as up to a decade of additional support services including career coaching and training, mental health support, and financial assistance for books, laptops and emergency needs. While the scholarship doesn’t require students to study in state, it is expected to dramatically boost the fortunes of the region’s graduates, a significant portion of whom will stay. The payoff? A study by the Parker Strategy Group found that over the course of a decade, with 100 students supported in each graduating class, the Greater Futures program would create 760 college graduates (50 with master’s degrees), $151 million contributed in additional local and state taxes, and entrepreneurial and investment success that would support and sustain 9,110 more jobs. 5. Lithium Loop For funding the creation of a fully domestic lithium mining economy to supercharge EV and battery production in the U.S. As the growth of renewable energy and EVs continues to gain momentum globally, the United States finds itself playing catch-up, especially to China, when it comes to mining and manufacturing the raw materials and finished goods behind this monumental shift. In Nevada, advocates for what’s called the Lithium Loop hope to start closing that gap. The plan, an effort supported by the governor’s office, state and local officials, and university partners, and backed by federal funding for the Nevada Tech Hub at University of Nevada-Reno, is to create and expand a closed circle for lithium-ion battery manufacturing, from digging up the materials to assembling and even recycling spent batteries, that becomes a “cradle to cradle” hub for the nation’s electrification and energy storage needs. Millions of dollars in funding for job training is flowing, and the Bureau of Land Management has approved two future lithium mines, Thacker Pass and Rhyolite Ridge. The state has already become a hotbed for the domestic battery industry, with firms like Tesla and Redwood Materials. But now the potential of the Lithium Loop to help bolster production, and fill in increasing demand for utilities and AI data centers, promises to grow the industry, incubate startups, and create up to 50,000 new jobs by 2029. 6. Save the Waves Coalition For insuring surf breaks—and the communities that rely on them—in the event of natural disasters It’s not possible to get a doctorate in surfonomics. But according to work done by surfing nonprofit Save the Waves, studying the local economic benefit of popping up and dropping in can be a boon to protecting surf spots around the globe. Last September, Save the Waves released a study of the surf economy for Santa Cruz, California, breaking down the environmental risks, investment strategies, and benefits of the region’s $194 million annual surf economy. It’s work like this that has fueled the organization’s more ambitious economic effort around the $9.5 billion global surf economy, creating an insurance policy for surf breaks. The idea is to measure the impact of surfing on a local economy, create a local trust that would benefit the relevant stakeholders, then enact an insurance policy that would pay out everyone in the event of a storm or disaster. Save the Waves has already set up such a system in El Salvador, enlisting global insurer Willis Towers Watson as a partner. Starting in 2026, the model will be up and running. It’s an idea the nonprofit hopes to expand across the oceans as a model for protecting local surf economics from the ravages of climate change. 7. OX Delivers For a cheap electric truck that aids mobility in Rwanda, while making small businesses more profitable A U.K. company that designed a bare-bones, easy-to-ship electric truck, OX Delivers seeks to solve a key conundrum for African farmers and entrepreneurs: with unstable, unaffordable, and uncertain transportation options, how can small businesses get goods to market? It’s an important question. Globally, the Food and Agricultural Organization estimates this problem leads to $400 billion worth of food spoiling before ever reaching a buyer. The OX, an electric truck with a 90-mile range that can be outfitted with cold storage, offers a cheaper, more reliable way to move goods. In Rwanda, where OX Delivers has created a service allowing farmers and merchants to rent space on these vehicles, it’s made formerly long, arduous journeys, sometimes on bicycle, far more efficient. So far, the company has signed up 5,000 customers since launching in 2021. The company has faced challenging economics, despite signing a $163 million contract in December 2024 to add service in nearly a half-dozen new countries. But the firm’s acquisition in late February by Berekley Coachworks, which brings commitment to the mission, passion for the technology, and fresh resources, gives it a new runway for growth and expansion. 8. St. Louis Art Place Initiative For finding a way to support a more thriving arts economy in a shrinking Midwestern metro The challenge of an affordable lifestyle and the tenuous nature of federal funding has been a tough one-two punch to art and culture in our cities. In St. Louis, a new initiative seeks to transform what some many see as blight into home and creative spaces for aspiring creatives. The Arts Place Initiative plans to turn vacant lots into affordable housing and creative space for artists. By cobbling together different grants, such as funding from the Community Development Administration, the initiative seeks to help pay a portion of the downpayment, with artists responsible for the mortgage, taxes, and insurance. In the Gravois Park neighborhood, for example, a three-story home is being converted into residential units for low-to-moderate income artists, with a backyard accessory dwelling unit being turned into an artist-in-residence program space. In all, the Arts Place Initiative plans to build 20 homes for artists, co-designing the properties and seeking to prevent displacement and build wealth through homeownership. The push for new artists housing is part of a larger network of programs focused on investment in the arts. Additional efforts include diverting a portion of tourism tax to the Regional Arts Commission and creating a maker district on Delmar Boulevard. 9. State of Illinois Climate and Equitable Jobs Act For typing utility improvements to bottom-line investments helping the budgets and health of low-income residents In a clever spin on the phrase “power to the people,” Illinois lawmakers have figured out a novel and successful formula that not only pushed utilities to be better public servants and cut their emissions, but also uses this cudgel to directly improve the lives of low-income utility clients. The Climate and Equitable Jobs Act, passed in 2021, mandates that utilities in the state cut electricity consumption; paying for home electrification, including electric stoves and heat pumps, counts for that reduction. That’s why the law has become a prime engine for low-income electrification across the state; residents can get more efficient heaters, new cooling systems, and electric ranges that reduce indoor air pollution. More than 700 homes have benefitted from whole-house electrification in just the past three years, with zero costs upfront. As the program drives down electricity use and cuts pollution, it also helps state residents lock-in cheaper electricity bills, at a time when rising energy costs have become a key political issue. Pairing the effort with solar and battery storage can save even more. With cuts and cancellations to federal programs for energy efficiency and green retrofits, these kinds of state-level solutions become even more important. 10. Re.green For using AI and an economic development model to help restore the Amazonian rainforest Considering the importance of the Amazon rainforest to our global climate, it’s clear not all forests are created equal. As Brazilian firm re.green sees it, not all forest restorations projects are created equal, either. Utilizing a unique technology and analytics model, fusing AI, satellite imagery, and seed-planting drones to figure out the most cost-effective, sustainable spots for forest restoration, re.green believes it can be much more effective at replanting and managing carbon credits. By planting in degraded farmland that used to be rainforests, re.green seeks to reverse the great decline of this crucial biome. And with its commitment to native hardwood species–it works with nearly two dozen partner nurseries–it creates sustainable, harvestable wood that can bolster business and jobs for local communities. To date, Re.green has restored nearly 100,000 acres, planted more than 6 million seedlings, and created hundreds of local jobs. In 2025, the company not only won the prestigious Earthshot Prize for its sustainability efforts, but also landed a massive deal with Microsoft to restore 82,000 acres of forest and signed a $15 million deal with the Brazilian development bank. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

The way we consume culture has fractured into millions of pieces and the far corners of the internet. But media companies are finding creative ways to keep capturing market share. For publishing imprint Bloom Books, that means capitalizing on TikTok’s rise by turning #BookTok’s viral hits into paperback bestsellers. For Webtoon, it’s doubling down on a dynamic fast-metabolism format with five-minute-long “episodes” that bring comic books to life. The satiric newspaper The Onion is channeling its best quality—humor—into a new revenue stream by opening its own ad agency, while the New York Times is cranking out vertical video reels meant to be viewed on smartphones. Live sports continue to command audiences, with Beyond Sports offering a unique twist by rendering players as animated cartoon characters in action, in real time. Former YouTube channel turned entertainment company Dude Perfect is chasing the “live” element with a stadium tour, which attempts to land the trick shots and other antics that made it famous. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s buzziest new podcast, TBPN, brings SportsCenter energy to business and technology news. And AI continues to be a driving force. Some companies are focused on charting a responsible path forward, like cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, whose recent moves block LLMs from stealing journalists’ work. Others explore AI’s potential, like Moments Lab, which is training a filmmaking chatbot. Still others are using AI for the public good, like the Council on Foreign Relations, which is collaborating with Anthropic to rapidly translate thousands of Chinese Communist Party “dark matter” texts never before seen by American policymakers, into English. 1. Cloudflare For safeguarding the Internet from AI crawlers Founded in 2009 and now one of the world’s biggest cybersecurity companies, Cloudflare is both buttress and bulwark for much of the internet’s architecture. It speeds up websites by routing data through edge networks—serving 80% of the top generative AIs—and protects 20% of all existing websites from malicious attacks. That means it’s also equipped to block bots employed by AI companies—trawlers that scrape any written word found online for chatbot training. Some magazines and newspapers have drafted deals to license content to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. But bots from Perplexity, for example, have been caught stealing data without permission, tanking financial incentives for content creators to keep putting out new stuff. In September 2024, Cloudflare launched AI Audit, which lets websites block AI crawlers with a single click—a service since used by 1 million customers. And in July 2025, it took the trailblazing step of blocking crawlers by default—websites can choose to allow them, with AI companies identifying their mission as training, inference, or search—and it’s now developing a “Pay Per Crawl” feature. The moves have been cheered by more than 40 companies including Conde Nast, Time, Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora, but for Cloudflare, it’s not just about digital altruism— it’s good business. As CEO Matthew Prince puts it: “Nobody wants to see the world consolidated into 5 AI companies. There would be very few businesses left to serve.” Cloudflare undergirds trillions of web traffic connections each day, with $2.2 billion in revenue (up 30% year-over-year) from 332,000 customers in 2025. Read more about Cloudflare, honored as No. 21 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. TBPN For becoming Silicon Valley’s go-to tech ‘news’ network You can’t throw a stone in Silicon Valley without hitting a tech-bro-turned-pundit starting a podcast. But few have enjoyed as meteoric a rise as 29-year-old Jordi Hays and 36-year-old John Coogan, whose TBPN (“Technology Business Programming Network”) launched just 16 months ago and has since skyrocketed to tech-world fame. Their angle? The pair tackle business news like sports commentators. Each 3-hour episode is energetic and rambling, hyping startup culture, gossiping about the AI talent wars as if they were tracking sports teams trading all-star players, and following buyout deals as if they were heavyweight-fight victories. It’s not hard-hitting journalism, but they seem to have struck gold with a simple idea: Like sports fanatics, the tech world loves drama. Many observers have drawn comparisons to ESPN’s SportsCenter—and part of the appeal is that TBPN’s hosts, as former entrepreneurs themselves, know the inside baseball (Hays founded crowdfunding VC Party Round, and Coogan cofounded meal replacement Soylent). TBPN has earned clout both within tech’s elite circles and more fringe crowds on X, with guests ranging from Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen to pseudonymous social media celebrities like @carriednointerest. In December, TBPN inked a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange to broadcast from its trading floor, and in January, both hosts were picked up by blue-chip talent agency CAA. TBPN relies on no outside investors and says it is profitable, bringing in $5 million in ad revenue in 2025. In September, the company hired a former Postmates and HQ Trivia executive as its first president and charged him with tripling revenue in 2026. According to the company, it already sold almost all its 2026 ad inventory by December. Read more about TBPN, No. 43 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. The Onion For proving print isn’t dead—especially if it’s funny With newspapers across the country disappearing, The Onion looked very much like yet another casualty. Founded in 1988, the legacy satire brand shuttered its print business in 2013 and was all but left for dead until 2024, when its website was taken over by a new coalition of owners led by Twilio’s billionaire CEO and a former NBC News reporter. Within months, the new ownership group breathed fresh life into the brand. First, it grabbed headlines with a publicity stunt: buying Alex Jones’ conspiracy-fueled right-wing outlet, InfoWars, out of bankruptcy. The Onion then bucked a long-running industry trend by resurrecting its print publication, which has hit the ground running. In September 2025, a year after it was reintroduced, it ranked as the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States by subscribers, slotting in between the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune, with almost 54,000 paying subscribers in over 50 countries. Since then, The Onion has only gained steam. In September, it revealed its next act: launching its own (funny) copywriting agency called America’s Finest, creating a new revenue stream. The agency has already netted gigs with Paramount (for its R-rated comedy The Naked Gun); the investing group Subversive ETFs (which targets publicly traded companies that sitting U.S. Congress members have invested in); and Frank McCourt’s nonprofit Project Liberty. The Onion’s total revenue tripled in 2025, up to roughly $6 million from under $2 million the previous year. Read more about The Onion, No. 48 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 4. Webtoon Entertainment For turning web comics into Hollywood IP—and vice versa The comic book universe exploded in the 2020s, and so did Webtoon. The South Korean web comics platform is the go-to place for big brands like Marvel and Star Wars to launch web comics around their intellectual property, already housing franchises like Stranger Things, Godzilla, and the legendary manga series Fullmetal Alchemist. In 2025, Disney took a 2% equity stake in the company and commissioned a standalone app for 35,000 comics from Disney’s iconic catalog. And it’s not the only media giant swinging big with Webtoon. In November, Warner Bros Animation announced a deal for 10 titles, and Webtoon is juggling 20 anime projects with Oscar-nominated studios DandeLion, Aniplex, and Crunchyroll. Webtoon’s ambition has grown alongside its Hollywood footprint. Beloved by Gen Z for its scrollable format, it branched into short-form video in 2025, releasing 5-minute episodes that infuse 14 Webtoon comics with motion, sound, music, and voice acting. Webtoon is also taking cues from not only TikTok, but also Netflix — last year it revamped its home page with algorithms based on reading history, and it threw open the doors to an online fan merch shop and a 2026 Los Angeles creator residency. Perhaps Webtoon’s most impressive achievement is the content pipeline it has built: 900 of the platform’s titles have been adapted into over 11 million books, games, toys, TV shows, and films — including by Webtoon’s own studio, whose 2025 productions smashed records in the U.S. and Canada on Tubi. Owned by parent company and internet giant Naver, Webtoon has a sibling, fan fiction platform called Wattpad; both are part of an ecosystem that feeds the other with ever more content for cultivation. Webtoon boasts 155 million monthly active users, 24 million creators, and [TK 2025 REVENUE FROM MARCH 3, 2026 EARNINGS] 5. Bloom Books For flipping the script on the book publishing industry When publishing houses bet on authors, they typically do it in advance, signing a check after the pitch is made but before the novel is written. But Bloom Books, a 5-year-old imprint of Sourcebooks, is rewriting that business model — choosing instead to buy up the back catalogs of already self-published authors. It’s still a gamble, but with the odds stacked more in Bloom’s favor. The rise of TikTok’s “#BookTok” made it possible for any story posted online to go viral, amassing millions of fans and a cult following — and those are the stories Bloom targets. The company has honed a lucrative strategy that turns internet blockbusters into paperback best-sellers. The imprint’s focus on romance overlaps nicely with BookTok’s most burgeoning genres — think romantasy and fan fiction. Bloom’s first author was 50 Shades of Grey’s E.L. James, who left a prestige publisher to help launch the fledgling imprint in 2020. Bloom’s 52 authors released 99 books in 2025 — 32 of which became New York Times best-sellers, an impressive hit-rate of almost one-third. The imprint’s small roster punches above its weight, accounting for nearly a quarter of the U.S. romance fiction market. It’s the reason Sourcebook cracked the top 5 publishers by print sales in 2025, according to Circana Bookscan — bumping much-larger rival Macmillan out of the trade’s longtime “Big Five.” Bloom’s success even inspired its own case study at Harvard Business School. 6. Beyond Sports For sprinkling a little Disney magic onto the sports field The live-sports industry is booming, and so is the market for alt-casts (alternate telecasts), which augment the game-watching experience with everything from the Manning brothers commenting on the action to Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story re-enacting a hockey skirmish or football pile-up. The latter comes courtesy of Beyond Sports, a Netherlands tech company acquired by Sony in 2022 (for estimates of up to $70 million). Beyond uses AI to transform live gameplay into real-time animations, featuring beloved TV and movie characters. The aim is to bring more kids and non-sports-fans into the fold. The company’s tech wizardry powers ESPN’s wildly popular NFL “Funday Football” series. 2023’s inaugural Toy Story-themed broadcast became the most-viewed live event on ESPN+ and Disney+ at the time, and a December 2025 Monsters Inc.-themed broadcast—with more than half a million viewers—was praised by sports trade groups as an “unmistakable leap in the art form,” with Beyond producing smooth, natural body movements from a complex tangle of optical trackers and RFID data. (Pixar even had the movie’s star voice actors record 30 minutes of game-time commentary.) Since 2021, Beyond has won three Emmy Awards, and its audience is growing, with broadcasts moving from streaming-only to primetime cable in 2025. In October, ESPN renewed a deal for more Disney-themed NFL, NHL, NBA, and WNBA games. On December 1, the company revealed it’s absorbing fellow Sony division Pulselive, which builds digital ecosystems for rights holders like the Premier League and World Rugby. The move signals that Beyond might aspire to expand beyond telecasts, to become a hub for everything from fantasy sports to prediction markets. 7. The New York Times Company For reinventing itself again and again in the digital age In the cratering news-media landscape, the New York Times stands out for actually making money—$700 million in revenue last quarter, up 10% year over year, netting out to a 28% bump in investor earnings per share. What’s it doing right? It’s a master of adapting to changing times. Take its successful expansion into audio/visual content. Its wildly popular The Daily podcast turned the newspaper’s star columnists into prominent talking heads. More evidence of digital savvy: In October, the Times debuted a TikTok-like “Watch” app with short-form vertical videos from eye candy-laden sections such as NYT cooking, The Athletic, and Wirecutter. The self-described bid to lure in a younger audience appears to be working. In Morning Consult’s 2025 ranking of fastest-growing brands, the New York Times was No. 2 among Gen Z. The effort represents a deft pivot from longer-form TV (see: its early-2020s FX/Hulu docuseries) to content geared for mobile, with the company’s video consumption across platforms more than doubling in 2025. Last quarter, the Times added 460,000 digital-only subscribers, its biggest three-month jump in years, bringing the total number to 12.33 million. The company also credits its success to its strategy of bundling subscriptions, with more than half of subscribers now paying for multiple products. The latest challenge the 174-year-old paper has had to adapt to is the rise of AI, and in 2025, the Times continued to blaze a trail on copyright lawsuits to protect journalists, suing Perplexity for using its content without compensation (following a 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for similar allegations). It’s also making a statement on free speech in the The President era, suing the Defense Department and Secretary Pete Hegseth in December over the Pentagon’s restrictions on press access, which the Times called a violation of First Amendment rights. 8. Moments Lab For creating an AI librarian for video archives Paris-based Moments Lab (formerly called Newsbridge) is one of many companies training AI models—but it’s found a niche targeting the news industry and Hollywood. Its AI platform, trained on 1.5 billion assets, can “understand every moment in a video and make it searchable.” And its Discovery Agent, launched in September, can field conversational prompts to create whole new videos from raw footage, cutting a filmmaker’s journey from idea to execution down to a brisk three minutes. According to the company’s CEO, it’s just months away from being able to produce a full-length documentary of America’s history from a decades-spanning library of news reels. There seems to be plenty of opportunity for Moments in this space. Speed is king in news, and journalists are increasingly expected to deliver reports in near-real-time. Meanwhile, there’s mounting pressure in Hollywood to crank out more entertainment, faster and cheaper than before, a la Netflix. Moments doesn’t hide the fact that it might accomplish this by replacing human workers with tech: Its CEO told Business Insider last year that a US financial media client already admitted it would need fewer editors. Founded in 2016, Moments works with giants including Warner Bros. Discovery, Thomson Reuters, Sinclair, and LVMH. Banijay Entertainment, the production company behind reality TV hits Survivor, Big Brother, and MasterChef, also signed a deal in September to organize its vast video archives, and Hearst is among the clients testing the new agentic AI. In 2025, the company doubled its revenue, tripled its number of users, raised $24 million in funding, and won “Best of Show” awards from the National Association of Broadcasters and International Broadcasting Convention. 9. Dude Perfect For nailing the trick shots on a stadium tour Dude Perfect began as a YouTube channel in 2009, with five college guys attempting crazy feats like bucketing a basketball thrown from the nosebleed seats of a full-size stadium. Now 17 years later, the group is running a media juggernaut focused on what they call “sports comedy.” Its diverse business pursuits include filming a Nickelodeon TV show, designing a toy for Walmart, endorsing drive-thru coffee chain 7 Brew, and claiming 19 quirky world records (like longest barefoot Lego walk). In 2024, the company netted $100 million from venture capital firms and hired a former NBA executive as its first CEO. In 2025, it spent that much of that cash, revealing a sprawling theme park-esque headquarters in Texas and hosting a summer “Hero Tour,” in which performers attempt mind-boggling trick shots live at arenas in 21 cities across the country. Although the Hero Tour’s follow-up theatrical release in Regal Cinemas flopped (not everyone can pull off a Taylor Swift-style hat trick), the tour itself was a hit, with 15 sold-out shows and over 200,000 spectators. The group, which has publicly leaned into its founders’ Christian backgrounds, snagged the nation’s largest promoter for faith-based events for the tour. it also forged partnerships with Samsung Galaxy and Google Gemini, headlined Arthur Ashe Kids Day at the U.S. Open, and is releasing trick shot games on Nex Playground’s motion-powered gaming system this summer. Dude Perfect has been profiled in Forbes, The Associated Press, The Ankler, and on the Texas A&M blog (the guys’ alma mater). And its YouTube channel, where pro athletes like Serena Williams, Steph Curry, and Luka Doncic have joined the antics, has more than 60 million subscribers. 10. Council on Foreign Relations For enlisting AI to bring previously unreachable Chinese texts to scholars around the world Amid China’s ascent on the global stage, the Council on Foreign Relations—the 105-year-old think tank and publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine—turned its eye eastward. In 2024, it launched the China Strategy Initiative, aimed at navigating the fraught geopolitics between China and America. Enter China Open Source Observatory, the initiative’s new project, which seeks to shed light on the so-called “dark matter” of China policy—hard copy material from the Chinese Communist Party that is greatly influential but isn’t online, and thus isn’t “seen” by Americans. The observatory is employing AI to scan and translate a cache of 10,000 Chinese government texts that have never before been digitized. The U.S. government did similar translation work from 1941 to 2013, but with new AI tech, the observatory saw a chance to fill the void—opening a window into Beijing even as it closes its doors to U.S. officials. The observatory collaborated with Google and Anthropic engineers to supercharge the effort, pushing LLMs to achieve what it calls “near-perfect” Chinese language translation accuracy, even on specialized subjects like military affairs and diplomacy. The texts will be freely available and AI-crawlable—meaning the fruit of the project’s labor will become public knowledge via AIs like ChatGPT (sans some sensitive material only available to researchers). The first 1,000 volumes will be released this spring. Project leads Rush Doshi and Tanner Greer say the council’s work has already been used by scholars, policymakers, and journalists for papers, board meetings, and exposes. In the past year, the China Strategy Initiative’s analysis has shown up everywhere from Congressional testimony on Taiwan to a column in the New York Times. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

In some ways, the attention game for brands is only getting tougher. The increased pace of the cultural cycle and the tidal wave of slop hitting our feeds have added a layer of suspicion to any brand work. Is it real? How do you know? These are big, existential questions. This year, 20 companies, ranging from brands to agencies, are answering them from the perspective of marketers looking to build real connections with real people. The companies here are not only working to embed into and engage with culture, but they’re doing it in ways that reinforce the role of humans in that dynamic. It includes Dick’s Sporting Goods launching its own internal film studio to tell real stories of amateur athletes. It’s Heineken using its global reach to find a new successor for an Irish pub that’s been in the same family for 155 years. It’s Alto finding a way to make Expensify a secondary character in Brad Pitt’s blockbuster F1. You could argue that Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show was an ad for Levi’s (stadium) or Apple (show sponsor), but Adidas partnered with the chart-topping artist to launch his first signature shoe, which was on full display. Culture and commerce seamlessly connected to the delight of fans everywhere. The variety of brand work celebrated on this list—Nike, Billie, Cheetos, Brawny, Ikea—is a testament to the very real creative ambition behind it. 1. Adidas For taking the three stripes on tour with Oasis’s blockbuster reunion A major part of Adidas’s recovery from its Yeezy debacle has been how it’s leaned into the brand’s heritage in sneakers and sports, pairing iconic products with smart partnerships that put the brand back at the center of culture. During Oasis’s blockbuster 2025 reunion tour, the three stripes were everywhere thanks to its Original Forever collab with the band on a limited-edition line of products and even a brand ad that ran in stadiums before every concert. It also extended to the Super Bowl halftime show, thanks to its ongoing work with Bad Bunny. As part of his Puerto Rican concert residency last summer, he partnered with Adidas to produce three custom Sambas celebrating the island’s culture. Ahead of his hit Super Bowl halftime show, they launched his first original shoe, the BadBo 1.0, and the limited edition of 1,994 sneakers (a nod to the artist’s birth year) sold out in minutes. Read more about ⁠Adidas, No. 7 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. Unwell For elevating the Call Her Daddy ethos into a media empire—and a new brand agency As the host of Call Her Daddy, Alex Cooper has evolved from a “try-hard vlogger” into the head of a podcast network, production company, and drink brand under the umbrella of her Unwell brand. In October 2025, she continued to expand her vision with the launch of the Unwell Creative Agency, a strategic move to help brands connect with her predominantly Gen Z and millennial female fanbase. Unlike typical celebrity ventures that leverage preexisting Hollywood fame, Unwell is built on Cooper’s self-made, unfiltered persona. The agency’s debut campaign—a Google Pixel 10 ad cowritten by, directed by, and starring Cooper—put her vision at the forefront, delivering an entertaining spot that garnered more than 39 million views on TikTok. As the agency looks to add clients, Cooper is focused on maintaining the authenticity that has defined her as a trusted voice for her audience. Read more about Unwell, honored as No. 23 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. Wieden+Kennedy For giving the swoosh its swagger back It’s not that Nike has been resting on its laurels. But the brand hasn’t exactly been exercising the quintessential edge that made so much of its advertising iconic over the decades. That changed last year, owing largely to the work W+K has crafted across the Swoosh and Jordan Brand. The agency that coined “Just Do It” brought the swagger back with Nike’s first Super Bowl ad in 27 years putting female athletes at the center of a male-dominated moment in the most-watched ad of Super Bowl LIX. The “So Win” ad has 98 million views on Instagram alone. The agency also helped launch Nike Football’s new brand platform, “Scary Good,” in global markets leading up to the 2026 World Cup, and its “Why Do It?” campaign put Nike’s iconic tagline into the context of today’s comparison and cringe culture that so often paralyzes earnest effort. Meanwhile, for Jordan Brand, the agency made a fun alt-history called “Can’t Ban Greatness” that jokingly gives the brand a bit too much cultural credit. It got 6.34 billion total campaign impressions and 65.4 million campaign views across the brand’s social channels. 4. Publicis Groupe For pairing engaging brand work with IRL impact Two agencies under the French holding company created two of the most creative pieces of brand work in the past year. First, in March 2025, creative agencies LePub and Publicis Dublin launched a worldwide recruitment campaign for Heineken called “Pub Succession” to help independent Irish pub owner, Josie McLoughlin, find a new successor for the pub that’s been in his family for 155 years. The brewer used its global reach to have eye-catching ads in cities worldwide where large numbers of Irish people have emigrated, including New York; Boston; Sydney; Auckland, New Zealand; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Phan Thiết, Vietnam; to find the right McLoughlin. It went to 128 countries, targeting the 88 million Irish around the world. It attracted more than 2,000 applications, got more than 1.19 billion earned media impressions, and they found their successor—Alan McLoughlin from Toronto. Then, in April 2025, Publicis Conseil made a three-word adjustment to French insurance company AXA’s home insurance policy that could mean the difference between safety and harm for women all over France. The three words are “and domestic violence.” AXA had long provided quick relocation resources to its home insurance customers in the event of fires or floods, but domestic violence—reports for which doubled in France between 2016 and 2023—had not been included. With its policy update, AXA modernized its business to meet the troubling trend; the company now instantly relocates victims who report domestic violence and provides legal, financial, and psychological support. Within the first month, AXA’s new policy had already helped 121 people. 5. Dick’s Sporting Goods For investing in its own entertainment studio to win the brand game Last year, Dick’s won a Sports Emmy for a doc called The Turnaround. In August, it premiered its newest documentary, Big Dreams: Little League World Series 2024, produced in partnership with Imagine Entertainment and MLB Studios. Soon after, it officially announced an in-house studio division called Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios to formalize its commitment to entertainment as a pillar of its brand. This is innovative in itself, since most brands announce things before ever doing any of the actual work. Here Dick’s is formalizing and boosting investment in a strategy it has been building for years. Last September, chief marketing officer Emily Silver told Fast Company that the new studio division will allow the brand to take a more aggressive stance in the number of films and pieces of content it puts out. It also helps brand the studio so that Dick’s can build more of a name for itself in the [entertainment] industry and attract different writers and different projects. And it gives the brand the opportunity to put a little more structure and framework around what content it wants to produce and where it wants to lean in to help build for the long term. “It really just helps formalize the process in a way that we can be a little more choice-ful about what we want to do in the future,” said Silver. 6. Billie For changing billboards into scratch-and-sniff ads Walking the streets of New York City has always been a cornucopia for the senses. And when it comes to smell, that reputation is too often on the negative side of the nasal scale. But last year, personal care brand Billie decided to change that with an innovative approach to a decidedly old-school advertising medium. Giant billboards posted at street-level in high-traffic areas of the city had enlarged shots of armpits and invited New Yorkers to literally smell their new Coco Villa body care scent by scratch-and-sniffing the armpit billboards. More than 5 million people went for it. The ads attracted widespread media coverage from outlets like the New York Post, ABC News, and Good Morning America, and they generated more than 1.76 billion impressions. Meanwhile, Coco Villa sales were up 60% on Amazon, the week after campaign launch. 7. Goodby Silverstein & Partners For turning Cheetos hands into a creative opportunity Cheetos has its fanatical fans already, but Goodby Silverstein & Partners didn’t need Chester or get Flamin’ Hot for some of its best work this past year. The innovation here is in how the agency creatively took a universal truth about a client’s product—that people get Cheetos dust on their hands—and turned it into a tool for growth and attention. “The Other Hand” campaign tapped into the fact that most people use their dominant hand to eat Cheetos, leaving their other hand to do the other work in life. Funny ads and billboards abound, but the real standout was “The Other Hand” font, created by designers using only their “other hand.” With no paid media it generated 432 million impressions and 11,000 downloads. It also led to a partnership with Netflix and Wednesday character Thing, making its fingertips in bright-orange Cheetle dust, crowning him the “Official Thingertips of Cheetos,” and becoming the brand’s most successful entertainment tie-in. For Cheetos, the campaign overall had 1.5 billion earned impressions, an 11-point lift in social awareness, and 5 million more bags sold in a category that was otherwise declining. 8. Johannes Leonardo For putting the Weinermobile in the Indianapolis 500 Back in 1936, Oscar Mayer’s nephew Carl G. Mayer thought it would be fun to make a hot dog car as a way to promote the brand. Man, he was right. The Wienermobile has been a brand icon ever since. Johannes Leonardo was tasked with reminding people just how iconic the Wienermobile is. What makes the Wienermobile work is that it’s something you can see, even take a ride in. So the agency decided to add rocket fuel to the idea of fan participation and spectacle as advertising by bringing Wienermobiles to one of America’s most iconic car races, the Indianapolis 500. So 89 years after the first Wienermobile rolled off that Chicago factory floor, the Wienie500 took place just before the Indy 500, pitting five WeinerMobiles against each other in a race streamed live on the Fox Sports app, with the same announcers and production crew as the Indy 500. The agency named and designed uniforms for each Wienermobile, making it possible for people to support a team on DraftKings, via a free-to-play pool. The race garnered 150 million total views on Fox Sports, and rival ESPN SportsCenter declared it “the Next Great American Tradition.” There were nearly 7 billion earned impressions as people shared the spectacle. Oscar Mayer saw its biggest Memorial Day sales lift in years. 9. The Martin Agency For supercharging its brand work with AI—thoughtfully but at scale The innovation here is the Martin Agency’s ability to evolve its way of working, particularly with AI, while delivering world-class work that’s still dependent on classic creativity. The agency uses predictive intelligence to surface invisible audiences, debunk conventions, and map unseen drivers of growth, while building other tools to codify and scale distinctive brand originality and avoid AI-driven sameness. The goal is a real alternative to legacy timelines, budgets, and processes. This year, the agency launched Bud Light’s “Armchair Quarterback”, a Netflix partnership blending sports fandom with branded storytelling; partnered with Hershey on a feature film debuting this year; and it worked with Subway Takes host and creator Kareem Rahma on UPS Business Trips. The latter has topped 100 million views. The agency is doing a formidable job in balancing innovation in brand entertainment with building out and scaling a workflow that incorporates AI and trains all employees to use AI for their work while identifying opportunities to be responsible about its use, like working with SAG-AFTRA to identify responsible use of voice talent. 10. Joan Creative For hilariously reinventing the Brawny Man mascot for today’s culture It’s not every day an iconic brand mascot gets reinvented. And when it does, the potential pitfalls are massive. But when Brawny wanted to hype its three-ply paper towel on the market as the strongest, most absorbent, most durable product of any national brand, in a world where 79% of consumers were looking for a tougher towel, Joan Creative called in the Brawny Man for a makeover. Suddenly, the bearded, plaid-clad muscle man was making memes, trying internet slang, even starring in GRWM (get ready with me) videos. Gone were the cute little orange juice spills. Now he was cleaning up after ragers. The result repositioned Brawny as a significant challenger to category-leader Bounty, while building long-term brand equity for Brawny parent Georgia-Pacific. The work generated more than 1.2 billion total impressions, 23% customer growth, and a 58% boost in search traffic for the brand. Now that’s a flex. 11. FCB For funding improvements to India’s rail system by turning train tickets into a chance to win the lottery As a result of the Omnicom-IPG merger, FCB was folded into BBDO but not before creating some impressively innovative ideas over the past year. Perhaps the best and most impactful example is the agency’s “Lucky Yatra” work for Indian Railways, launched in April 2025. As one of the largest railway systems in the world, Indian Railways has more than 24 million daily passengers daily. But a massive 41% of passengers don’t pay their fares, which results in more than $820 million in annual lost revenue. So FCB created a way to incentivize paying train fare. Indians spend about $30 billion on lottery tickets every year, so FCB turned the unique number on every Indian Railways ticket into a lottery ticket, thereby giving commuters the chance to win $117 every day, and $585 every week. The campaign received more than 560 million impressions and led to a 34% increase in ticket sales at launch. Not only that, but the investment in prizes is generating a revenue of over $685 million that will be reinvested back into the system to upgrade the centuries-old infrastructure. 12. Alto For making Expensify Brad Pitt’s F1 costar When expense management software brand Expensify asked Alto to come up with an idea just as big as a Super Bowl ad, the agency didn’t go to the big game. Instead, it went to Brad Pitt’s chest. The agency managed to land the brand a leading role in the blockbuster feature film F1, as a major sponsor of Pitt’s fictional racing team. The Expensify logo was everywhere, as all logos are in Formula One: Pitt’s racing suit, in press conferences, in dialogue, on pit wall signage. It even made the movie poster. People didn’t skip the ad—they paid to watch the logo framed on the screen for 40 full minutes during the film. Including a scene in which a main character is shooting an Expensify ad. The goal was to drive a double-digit lift in brand awareness over two quarters, but the result was a 94% increase in just six months. Another big moment was at the 2025 Met Gala, when F1 costar Damson Idris arrived in a custom Tommy Hilfiger racing suit with Expensify’s logo front and center. According to Launchmetrics, the Met Gala tie-in alone generated $1.3 billion in media impact value. Touchdown. 13. State Farm For gaming its own brand IP into a successful strategy beyond Jake Most brands have to make a choice between making funny ads, investing in entertainment IP, or going deep into major sports sponsorships. State Farm utilizes all of these— and Jake of course—to firmly embed the brand in culture. The brand has built a flywheel of content across many different audiences, which has helped the company boost its net worth to $145.2 billion in 2024, up from $134.8 billion in 2023. The project pushing its brand entertainment envelope the most over the past year has been Gamerhood. Part game show, part reality series, over five weekly episodes on Twitch and YouTube ,the show pits gaming creators like Kai Cenat, Ludwig, Mark Phillips, and Berleezy against each other in a combination of gaming and IRL challenges. The third season from last summer attracted more than 23 million views. It wrapped its fourth season in August, which was expanded to Prime Video, and its episodes had more than 27 million views on YouTube and Twitch alone. 14. Mischief @ No Fixed Address For pivoting Goldfish into a snack for adults to smile about A brand stunt is at its most impactful when it is rooted in truth. Since its founding in 2020, Mischief @ No Fixed Address has made a name for itself taking brand insights to their most ridiculous—and often, engaging—outcome, and this year was no exception. If there is a theme to the agency’s hit work, it’s that sometimes a brand’s own product packaging is the best media platform for a fun idea. When Pepperidge Farms tasked the agency with changing impressions that its Goldfish cracker brand was just for kids, Mischief used a cheeky rebrand to remind adults the snacks are for them too. Enter Goldfish “Chilean Sea Bass.” The new packaging and surrounding campaign drove attention to the tune of 14.5 billion impressions, hiking sales 15%, making it the brand’s most successful PR push ever. It wasn’t just selling snacks. When E.l.f. Beauty wanted to make sure people knew its Halo Glow Liquid Filter could also be used under foundation or as a highlighter, Mischief went all in on a familiar cliché. It created a Rebecca Black-voiced pony that took offense at the brand calling the Halo Glow Liquid Filter more than a one-trick pony, insisting she was a “Multi-Talented Small-Boned Horse.” The campaign and social work spiked the product’s sales 24% and 48%, respectively, within 72 hours of the campaign’s launch. 15. Rethink For turning late-night texts into an Ikea giveaway Between legacy brands and DTC upstarts, the mattress market is anything but soft. So in February 2025, when Ikea Canada wanted to get people’s attention to promote its mattresses, Rethink decided to target a very specific audience—sleep-deprived Canadians. Between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., the brands sent social media DMs to those still scrolling with a simple “u up?” text. Those curious enough to respond were awarded a free new mattress. The cheeky DMs were accompanied by an extended ad campaign across outdoor billboards and a timed promotion offering 15% off mattresses and other sleep products. As a result, the work got 4.5 million earned impressions and drove a 36% year-over-year increase in mattress sales for the brand. 16. BBDO For using nostalgia to boost Neutrogena’s retinol sales Back on May 17, 2000, more than 14 million people tuned in for the two-hour series finale episodes of Beverly Hills 90210, in which Donna Martin and David Silver were engaged and married. In that moment of pop-cultural history is where BBDO New York saw an opportunity for skincare brand Neutrogena. The agency created a spot that features a clip of the iconic proposal scene that is then interrupted by a dermatologist reminding fans that if they remember watching this episode, they probably should be in the market for Neutrogena’s Rapid Wrinkle Repair Cream. The campaign reversed a two-year sales decline, and 62% of consumers named Neutrogena their first-choice retinol brand. 17. Code and Theory For becoming the digital reinvention expert for the world’s biggest businesses Since 2001, Code and Theory has run on a 50-50 engine: half creatives, half engineers. It’s an agency designed to build creative solutions for a wide variety of major brands, from the NFL and Stanley Black & Decker to Diageo and Amazon. The agency helped redesign Diageo’s digital hub, theBar.com, which led to a 200% boost in e-commerce year over year, a 42% increase in user engagement, and 66% in return visitors. For Stanley Black & Decker, it led a massive digital transformation, unifying more than 30 brands across more than 55 markets, which led to a 40% increase in digital revenue year over year. Its redesign of the National Football League’s app led to a 20% boost in minutes spent on average per visit, 2.3 billion minutes streamed in app, and 5 million weekly app users. A B2B campaign for Amazon Ads was built to reframe Amazon as a bridge between local businesses and ready-to-buy customers, using behavioral signals to link digital intent with real-world demand. The results for small and medium-size businesses was a 10% boost in average monthly revenue per advertiser and a 33% increase for Amazon in unaided awareness. 18. Modern Arts For creating a hit Netflix doc with WhatsApp as its star Back in May 2025, a one-hour documentary dropped on Netflix called The Seat, chronicling the Mercedes Formula One team’s journey to replace legendary driver Lewis Hamilton, who had left for rival Ferrarai. It was instantly ranked in Netflix’s Top 10 rankings across numerous markets. What many viewers didn’t know is that the film is also a WhatsApp commercial, courtesy of brand entertainment agency Modern Arts. The company has been a leader in finding ways to show a brand’s cultural impact that fits seamlessly into existing viewing habits. The insight that led to the film was that many of the discussions and debates that resulted in Mercedes choosing young Italian driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli played out over messaging app WhatsApp. Here, Modern Arts found a lane to authentically weave a brand into a compelling IRL sports drama that doesn’t expire with a campaign clock but lives on streaming platforms for the foreseeable future. 19. Superconnector Studios For reimagining product placement with Netflix and AB InBev In September, Superconnector Studios brokered an unprecedented deal between one of the world’s biggest advertisers and arguably the globe’s biggest streaming platform. AB InBev—the parent to beer brands like Budweiser, Bud Light, Michelob Ultra, and Corona—signed a wide-ranging partnership deal with Netflix. This is not only getting these major beer brands front and center in Netflix’s push into live sports, but it’s also getting them early access to placement and integration into other Netflix programming like shows and movies. In just six months of the partnership, 14 titles are already in discussion or already live, including shows like Quarterback, Bridgerton, Full Swing: Ryder Cup, and Culinary Class Wars. With LVMH’s entertainment division 22 Montaigne, Superconnector is bringing a new Kenya Barris project into production this year, which wwill revolve around Hennessy’s historic Château in Cognac. 20. Tombras For helping Sweethearts win over Gen Z by ghosting Halloween The candy that usually features heartfelt messages is only big on Valentine’s Day. But last year, Tombras carved out a spot for Sweethearts during Halloween with a unique take on a scary situation. Not ghosts, but being ghosted by a date. The agency came up with the idea for limited-edition “Ghosted Sweethearts” and created a Halloween campaign that was Sweethearts’ first-ever direct-to-consumer push outside of Valentine’s Day. The boxes of candy dropped the typical messages, instead coming blank, in a box that says, “Started so sweet. Then poof! Gone.” Traffic to Sweethearts’ website surged 980% year over year (September to October), driving strong demand and e-commerce growth. The campaign generated nearly 500 million earned media impressions, valued at nearly $5 million in ad equivalency, becoming one of the most talked-about Halloween brand activations of 2025. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

The world of public relations has always been about making a splash. And in an age of more and more media clutter, breakthrough ideas have never been more important. To create that can’t-miss-it buzz, this year’s most innovative PR firms paired an A-list Hollywood actor with an A-list Hollywood director, staged a surprise pop-event in a major urban transportation hub, enlisted some of the biggest stars from the booming world of women’s sports, and employed some creative grammar to stir up social media chatter. Giant Spoon created a campaign for the emerging electric vehicle brand Lucid that was essentially a short action film, directed by James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, A Complete Unknown) and starring Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet. Jellyfish staged a surprise mini takeover of Grand Central Station to promote Apple TV+’s hit sci-fi series Severance. The Brand Agency not only created a memorable campaign for one of Disney’s most popular animated TV shows that had been on hiatus for nearly a decade, but it also enlisted Bradley Cooper to help the venerable BOSS fragrance line reach a younger audience with its newest scent launch. In the sports arena, Day One Agency leaned into the growing women’s sports wave by leveraging partnerships with female athletes and leagues for a popular beauty brand and teamed up with legendary tennis star Billie Jean King to promote a ride share service. For Super Bowl LIX, Colle McVoy deployed Paris Hilton to give traditional hot sauce brand Frank’s RedHot a dash of hip, and Alison Brod Marketing + Communications used an intentional typo to help get social media users talking about Coors Light. Black Arts PR helped Britpop mega-band Oasis make its much anticipated reunion tour a hit in its home country. Moonrock helped brands like Walmart and Ally Bank crack the wildly popular gaming space code. SolComms helped boost sales of contraception and cervical cancer prevention products, all with a greater social purpose in mind. And Weber Shandwick deployed AI bots to help navigate a real-time PR crisis for a major multinational food and beverage brand. 1. Giant Spoon For turning an ad for an emerging EV brand into a short action film (directed by James Mangold and starring Timothée Chalamet) If you were in New York City in the summer of 2024, you might remember the giant, inflatable dragon wrapped around the Empire State Building promoting HBO’s House of the Dragon. Giant Spoon was behind that. In 2025, the agency pulled off another big stunt: it got Timothée Chalamet, arguably Hollywood’s hottest young star, to be the face of its client Lucid Motors’ marketing campaign. For Lucid’s “Driven” campaign, the electric car brand partnered with Chalamet and director James Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, A Complete Unknown) on a high-octane short film that positioned Lucid’s Gravity model as the symbol of a reimagined automotive future. In the spot, Chalamet’s motorcycle breaks down, leading him and model Larsen Thompson to steal a Gravity SUV to escape. One social media user referred to it as “cinema gold” — and according to Giant Spoon, the campaign resulted in more than a 10% increase in likelihood of buying a Lucid for shoppers getting a car in the next 6 months. Ahead of the premiere of A24’s Marty Supreme, starring Chalamet, Giant Spoon worked with Lucid again on a content series where the three-time Oscar nominee drove one of the cars while being interviewed by New York Knicks stars Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart about what “greatness” means to him. In its first week, the series drew 2.87 million impressions on social media and secured press in publications like Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and more. According to Giant Spoon, the series set a new benchmark for Lucid, surpassing its highest social engagement ever within the first hour of launch. Overall, Giant Spoon says it grew new business by 13% year-over-year in 2025. 2. Weber Shandwick For using generative AI to help brands navigate crises in real-time In the Internet and Social Media Age, a PR crisis can go viral in an instant. To help companies respond as quickly and effectively as possible, Weber Shandwick developed an AI tool that can work just as fast. Weber I/O, an agentic crisis communications platform, navigates teams through unfolding scenarios in real time—drawing on an organization’s own plans and past responses, along with intelligence from similar crises, to forecast likely escalation and engagement scenarios and draft responses in the organization’s tone. For instance, the platform was essential during an ESG crisis faced by a Fortune 500 food and beverage client. In that case, Weber used its AI tools to track audience sentiment and media coverage in real-time and to detect crises and deploy AI agents to craft and send messages to appropriate outlets in the client’s voice. Those efforts streamlined the tasks crisis management hd to do so they could focus on more high-level work. For the same client, Weber Shandwick developed a campaign highlighting the company’s mission and commitment to creating and sustaining U.S. manufacturing jobs, and used AI to test a complex message for the marketplace across key audiences. The campaign generated significant social-media mentions and coverage in top-tier media outlets. According to Weber Shandwick, its North American business saw double-digit year-over-year growth in multiple sectors. 3. Jellyfish For engineering a viral popup event at Grand Central Station to promote Season 2 of Severance If you happened to pass through New York’s Grand Central Terminal on January 15, 2025, you might’ve stumbled across the mysterious glass office cubicle occupied by Severance cast members Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, Zach Cherry, all in character, that appeared in the middle of the station. It turns out it was a viral marketing stunt orchestrated by Jellyfish as part of a campaign promoting the second season of the Emmy-winning Apple TV hit. The immersive, live-action event featured the actors portraying their “”innie characters”” performing everyday office tasks, like staring at computer screens with green numbers flashing on them, just as they do on the show. According to Jellyfish, the stunt helped the Severance Season Two campaign earn 1 billion impressions, 3.5 million engagements, and over 77,000 organic social mentions. The campaign also earned the agency the Silver Lion award at the 2025 Cannes Lion festival. Severance, meanwhile, has become Apple TV’s most-watched series. 4. Colle McVoy For creating hip campaigns for formerly sleepy brands For many, the words “cool” and “hip” might not be the first terms that come to mind when they think of La-Z Boy recliners or Frank’s RedHot hot sauce. But last year, the Minneapolis-based full-service creative agency Colle McVoy helped reposition the brands as just that, winning them a new generation of fans. For La-Z-Boy, the agency did a brand refresh targeted to Gen Z, positioning the product as more than just your grandpa’s old-school couch. The effort included a new logo, a softer visual identity, and a confident, inviting tone that positioned the product as more than a chair or sofa, but rather a sanctuary. The agency also led a #BanReclining campaign, in which people signed a pledge to keep their seats upright when they’re on an airplane. That effort resulted in more than 470,000 pledges, while the campaign drew some 2.9 billion impressions overall, plus coverage in major media outlets including CNBC. In its most recent earnings report, La-Z-Boy reported an increase in sales to $522 million, up 4 percent from the previous period. For Frank’s RedHot, meanwhile, Colle McVoy tapped Paris Hilton as the face of the brand for a winky Super Bowl LIX campaign that played on Hilton’s kitschy internet fame and her iconic catchphrase “That’s hot.” Instead of releasing a traditional in-game spot, the brand focused on the week leading up to the game, when fans are filling their shopping carts for their game-day parties. During that period, Hilton unveiled her own bedazzled Frank’s bottle and shared her “hottest” recipes for Buffalo chicken wings and dip with fans. Within 24 hours, more than 20,000 fans also submitted their own recipes in response to a Frank’s request. In all, the campaign resulted in 7.1 billion earned impressions and drove pre-game sales to a record $7.1M, a 178% year-over-year increase. 5. The Brand Agency For creating fun, experimental activations for “forgotten” brands and media The all-female team behind creative communications firm The Brand Agency delivered a one-two punch for brands that hadn’t been top of mind for some time. Disney’s animated series Phineas and Ferb, for example, was off the air on a 10-year hiatus, before returning for a fifth season. The Brand Agency helped promote the show’s comeback marketing campaign, which took place over the summer (the titular characters’ favorite season, since school is out). Their efforts included a stop at the Vans Warped tour (which itself was returning from a multi-year hiatus), activations including a secret spy lair disguised as an ordinary portable bathroom, and a Los Angeles premiere party that featured cast members like Ashley Tisdale and Vincent Martella, who performed popular songs from the show. According to the agency, the campaign received 3.1 billion earned media impressions, $79.6 million in estimated media value, and 11.5 million organic social media impressions. The 100-year-old fashion brand BOSS, meanwhile, which has been releasing its own signature scents for nearly 40 years, has spent the past few years attempting to refresh its image for younger generations. To aid that effort, The Brand Agency supported the campaign for the launch of the new BOSS Bottled Beyond fragrance, which featured actor Bradley Cooper and Colombian singer Maluma as brand ambassadors. For the launch party, held at the Manhattan’s immersive tech museum Mercer Labs, the agency invited influencers and celebrities like TikToker Noah Beck and Abbott Elementary star Tyler James Williams. Activations included scent samplings and photo opportunities. Cooper and Maluma were at the party and prior to the event, the agency hosted a separate performance with Maluma at the top of the Empire State Building. According to the agency, the event generated 7.7 billion earned media impressions, $192.7 million in total estimated media value, and 88.2 million in organic social media impressions. Overall, The Brand Agency says it grew by 32% in gross billings between January and September 2025, marking its third consecutive year of double-digit growth. 6. Black Arts PR For bringing Oasis into the social media age “I said maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me.” It seems that Black Arts PR, the firm that represents Oasis, took those lyrics to heart when handling public relations in the UK ahead of the wildly popular Britpop band’s much anticipated 2025 tour—its first in 16 years. When the group announced it was going on the road after the lengthy hiatus, fans were shocked. Had band members and brothers Noah and Liam Gallagher squashed their long-running public beef? Either way, the global reunion tour, which took place during the fall and summer last year and spanned the U.K., Europe, North America, and South America, ended up making more than $380 million in ticket sales, merchandise, and sponsorships — and is likely to reach more than $1 billion for its entire global run. Leading up to and during the tour, Black Arts PR handled the UK regional press for the band, with a campaign focused on reminding fans of the pride, nostalgia, and impact its music carries back at home. For instance, the firm touted the 30th anniversary of “Wonderwall” — the band’s most popular album, with 22 million copies sold globally — by heavily pushing limited-edition releases of “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory” box sets that featured four remastered 7” vinyl discs with B-sides in a “cigarette-style” box, including various colorways. The Sunday Times went on to call the Oasis comeback tour the “biggest rock comeback in history.” 7. SolComms For helping companies find new prescriptions for improving women’s health After the re-election of Donald The President in November 2024, the telehealth company Wisp saw sales of its reproductive health products, such as its Plan B morning after pill, spike as women began to stockpile emergency contraception for fear that they might lose access to it. SolComms worked with Wisp to gather data demonstrating the phenomenon, then publicize it. That effort led to over 700 media placements, including segments on CNN and stories in The Hill and The Associated Press, that resulted in more than 9 billion impressions. The campaign didn’t just help Wisp boost its business (according to SolComms, the company saw an immediate 2,000% surge in emergency contraception sales); it also helped the company fulfill its goal of raising awareness of women’s health issues. The fact that 10% of Wisp’s patients live in reproductive care deserts made the effort even more meaningful. Also in 2025, SolComms worked with Teal Health, a virtual women’s health company that focuses on eliminating cervical cancer by offering at home screening kits for the disease. The agency helped position the FDA’s approval of the kits as a milestone for women’s health, driving over 1,700 media stories and 13.9 billion impressions. All told, the campaign spiked consumer sign-ups by 250%. 8. Moonrock For helping brands like Walmart find a cheat code for video-game marketing Little-known fact: With some 3.5 billion players worldwide, gaming is a more popular entertainment option than movies and music combined. Moonrock is at the forefront of tapping that popularity for marketers, through both digital and real-world efforts. In 2025, for instance, the agency produced Walmart Skyward, a custom activation built in Minecraft that also extended into Discord. Through Skyward, players could go in and explore a branded world while engaging in Walmart’s Discord Video Quest program. That program allowed users to join Walmart Skyward’s server (a digital public space where users can chat and interact) to watch a trailer to unlock rewards like Discord avatars and other in-game items. According to Moonrock, Walmart Skyward drove “”millions”” of community interactions in Minecraft and Discord, with influencers engaging organically, fans creating content, and the campaign running well beyond its launch window. Discord also reported that the program resulted in over 513,000 completed views and 178 days of total watch time, surpassing established benchmarks and driving strong engagement. In another effort for Wamart, Moonrock launched an in-store gaming tour that spanned 75 locations across the United States, bringing hands-on gameplay and brand experiences to Walmart parking lots. For Ally Bank, meanwhile, the agency created Tee Time Speed Run a custom, immersive golf experience on Fortnite where players can “”be the ball,”” and participate in different obstacle courses and challenges. That initiative won a Digiday Award for Best Esports/Gaming Campaign. 9. Alison Brod Marketing + Communications For spinning a “mistake” into marketing gold No, your eyes weren’t deceiving you. In conjunction with Super Bowl LIX last year, Coors Light launched a series of ads that read “Mountain Cold Refershment” in which “refreshment” was deliberately misspelled. The spots appeared as print ads in the New York Times and on large digital billboards in high-profile locations like Times Square. Social media users quickly noticed the mistake, with many wondering whether it was a genuine proofreading error. In a public statement, Coors Light blamed it on a “case of the Mondays.” The company also released limited-edition “Mondays Light” 12-packs as well as sloth-themed ads and merch, like a “chill face roller,” to promote relaxation on everyone’s least favorite day of the week, especially the one after the Big Game. Alison Brod Marketing + Communications helped capitalize on the misspelling to make sure it went viral on social media and was covered in top media outlets. For the “Case of the Mondays” brand for the 12-packs and merchandise, the agency helped develop and push the “chill” narrative and helped position the beer brand as the solution to cure the post-Super Bowl Monday blues. Those efforts helped drive 12.6 billion earned impressions. All told, the brand sold some 1.8 billion of the limited-edition beer packs. 10. Day One Agency For tapping into the women’s sports boom to reach new audiences Michael Jordan may have ushered in the Golden Age of athlete as pitchman. Now, with women’s sports booming, Caitlin Clark, Coco Gauff, and others are taking up the mantle. This past year, New York-based Day One Agency helped bring e.l.f Beauty and Lyft Silver into the sports marketing arena. For Gen Z beauty favorite e.l.f, the agency secured a partnership with Katherine Legge—the only woman racing in the NASCAR CupXfinity Series and Indy 500—sponsoring her during races in which she drove an e.l.f.-branded car. D1A got e.l.f into the ring with female wrestlers, becoming the first-ever beauty sponsor for the Wonder Women of Wrestling (WWW) Varsity Tournament, the largest high school girls’ wrestling event in the United States. And the agency brokered a sponsorship deal between e.l.f and the Professional Women’s Hockey League, tapping Minnesota Frost star Kendall Coyne Schofield as a brand ambassador. All told, according to D1A, e.l.f supported more than 500 athletes and drew more than 12 billion impressions from activations in 26 cities worldwide. For Lyft Silver, D1A paired the newly launched service, which aims to help the millions of older adults in the United States who lack adequate transportation, with tennis legend Billie Jean King—demonstrating an ability to reach diverse demographic groups. To that same end, D1A also helped forge a collaboration between Lyft Silver and the New York Liberty’s Timeless Torches dance troupe. The results? Lyft reported that Lyft Silver got off to a strong start. Rides have doubled since last May, with an 80% user retention rate, and nearly 20% of Silver users are new to the platform. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

It should come as no surprise that the global chip wars that grabbed headlines over the past year made an impact at the top of the Asia-Pacific list. Taiwanese semiconductor giant TSMC, in the No. 1 position, has reinforced its role as an industry lynchpin, becoming the first to put hotly anticipated 2-nanometer chips into production. Tokyo Electron, which provides the specialized equipment for semiconductor production that the companies like TSMC use, played a critical supporting role. Its recent innovations in etching technology have helped make chips run faster and with lower energy footprints. The region saw other high-tech innovations, too. Australia-based Novalith has found a way to produce battery-grade lithium cheaper and greener than existing techniques, opening the door to lighter, more efficient batteries in a range of devices. Other companies on the list focus on sustainable solutions, too. Varaha, an India-based startup that converts agricultural waste and invasive plants into a charcoal-like substance called biochar, has inked deals to help Big Tech heavyweights to meet their carbon targets. Akvo, another Indian company, is addressing water scarcity by lowering cost barriers to systems that convert air humidity into drinking water. Other innovators include South Korea-based Samyang Foods, which not only pulled off a viral marketing win with its line of fiery ramen but rapidly scaled up production to meet demand. Chinese device manufacturer Elehear developed some the best-rated and most affordable over-the-counter hearing aids available. And Australian biotech Cauldron Ferm is using fermentation to mass produce ingredients for everything from baby formula to sustainable aviation fuel. 1. TSMC For leading the race for a 2nm chip that takes AI and electronics into a new era Microchips are the basis of the modern world, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is renowned for making the majority of leading-edge chips. At the end of last year, it quietly put into production an even smaller, more efficient 2-nanometer chip, narrowly beating out Samsung. Semiconductor technology has been evolving at hyperspeed to address the demands of energy-intensive computing, largely fueled by the explosion of AI. TSMC’s 2nm chips offer a 25-30% reduction in power compared to earlier 3nm chips running at the same speed. Production volumes are scheduled to ramp up this year, with early purchasers reportedly set to include Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, and Google. While most of TSMC’s chips are made in Taiwan, the company is also investing in fabs in the U.S., including a massive complex in Phoenix, Arizona, as part of a $165 billion pledge to expand its American chip building capacity. 2. Varaha For helping carbon removal make more business sense in India and beyond Carbon removal has been a heavily hyped and often criticized green-tech pursuit for years. But the past year saw some real movement. Varaha, a climate-tech startup based in India, has secured partnerships with Google and Microsoft while collaborating on carbon removal projects with smallholder farmers across Asia. One of Varaha’s key products is biochar, a charcoal-like substance made from organic waste that can support soil health. In the Banni Grasslands reserve in western India, the company coordinates with local communities to harvest an invasive tree, Prosopis juliflora, that has edged out native grasses needed for cattle grazing. But Varaha’s biochar recipe varies depending on what’s available; elsewhere, it uses cotton stalks and corn shanks after harvest. Varaha buys the unwanted biomass from farmers, processes it into biochar, then distributes the new material as a sustainable soil additive. ​Last year, Google agreed to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon credits from Varaha through 2030. And in January, Microsoft signed a deal for more than 100,000 tons of carbon removal over the course of three years. In February, Varaha secured $20 million as part of a projected $45 million Series B funding, following a $30.5 million investment last year to help expand regenerative farming. 3. Upstage For developing a compact LLM that’s fluent in Asian languages While many of the top large language models come from the United States and China, Upstage, a small Korean tech start-up, has broken into the competition. Its Solar Pro 2 was designed as an enterprise LLM to help with business tasks. It’s especially good at analyzing different types of unstructured documents and turning them into structured data—great news for insurance companies and other businesses heavy on document processing. Last year, Solar Pro 2 was recognized as the country’s first “frontier model” by the UK-based benchmarking platform Artificial Analysis. It came in 12th on the group’s intelligence index, out-competing some rivals that were trained on vastly more parameters. (For comparison, top-ranked Grok-4 was trained on an estimated 1.7 trillion parameters, versus Upstage’s mere 31 billion.) Upstage raised $45 million last year, bringing its total funding to more than $150 million. A chunk of that came from Amazon Web Services, which will be collaborating with Upstage to develop future foundation models. 4. Transcelestial For finding an alternative to fiber optic cables Transcelestial, a Singaporean communications startup, has developed wireless laser technology to provide internet networks in hard-to-reach places. The company uses optical technology to transmit data via lasers through the air, which can offer fiberoptic-grade connectivity without cables. That’s a big plus in places where it’s not feasible to lay down costly fiber-optic networks, like many of Southeast Asia’s vast archipelagoes. In the Philippines, for example, Transcelestial partnered with Globe Telecom to overcome geographical barriers and connect underserved regions. Last year, Transcelestial launched its technology into orbit, along with an EU-funded 6G research initiative, aboard a SpaceX rocket. The company also plans to have its tech aboard Singapore’s first inter-satellite laser communications mission, which is scheduled to be tested in orbit this year. In February, Transcelestial signed an agreement with Australia’s Gilmour Space to provide high-speed data transmission on a satellite set to launch later this year. 5. Tokyo Electron For making semiconductor technology more sustainable Tokyo Electron, founded in 1963, is one of the largest exporters of semiconductor production equipment, supplying the tools that chip giants like TSCM and Intel need to make ever-smaller, faster, more efficient devices. Already, it boasts about 92,000 tools in operation worldwide and releases about 6,000 new systems annually. Over the past year, the company says it has perfected atomic layer deposition (ALD) and atomic layer etching (ALE), processes that enable the production of sub-3nm devices. It has also made advancements in high-aspect ratio contact (HARC) etch technology called cryogenic etching, contesting U.S.-based Lam Research’s market dominance in the process. Etching removes material from a wafer’s surface to create microscopic structures of three-dimensional electrical circuits. Cryogenic etching uses extremely low temperatures to achieve high-speed etching faster and more energy-efficiently than other conventional methods. Samsung Electronics will reportedly be using this Tokyo Electron tech in the latest version of its V-NAND flash memory technology. 6. Novalith For scaling a more sustainable and affordable way to refine lithium The race to electrify everything and ditch fossil fuels is largely predicated on batteries, and most batteries require lithium. But mining the critical mineral poses ecological risks. In traditional lithium mining, sulfuric acid is used to leach lithium from hard rock, resulting in acid mine drainage that can cause devastating pollution if not disposed of correctly. Australian startup Novalith Technologies has developed a refining process that it says can produce battery-grade lithium from ores faster, cheaper and greener than existing techniques. A series of successes over the last year at a pilot facility in Sydney positions the company to scale commercially in the months ahead. Novalith says its plant’s modular design allows units to be built faster and with an estimated 30% reduction in capital expenditure. The company has a contract with a U.S. company to build a facility in 2027, and it has signed more than 50 NDAs with global mining and battery partners—a prelude to deploying its technology across Canada, Korea and Japan. 7. Elehear For creating affordable OTC smart hearing aids Prescription hearing aids can run anywhere from $1,500 to more than $7,000 a pair. Elehear, based in Shenzhen, China, is leading a new wave of direct-to-consumer hearing technology that aims to improve affordability without compromising on quality. Elehear’s over-the-counter hearing aids are among the cheapest on the market, with prices ranging from $399–$599. Last year, Elehear launched its Beyond Pro hearing aids with improved features including an upgraded AI technology designed to reduce noise, control feedback, and make voices clearer in noisy environments. Using the Elehear app, users can customize the hearing aid’s settings to control for the level of background noise or use presets for whether they’re in a restaurant, watching TV, or listening to music. Bluetooth connectability allows users to stream phone calls and music. The Beyond Pro also offers enhanced tinnitus relief by offering ambient soundscapes that help mask the condition’s auditory symptoms. 8. Samyang Foods For taking a spicy South Korean export across the globe You may have never heard of the South Korean food maker Samyang Foods, but you’ve definitely heard of the viral instant noodles Buldak, with its colorful packaging, various spicy flavors, and rosy-cheeked chicken mascot named Hochi. Last year, the instant-ramen-maker was named Gen Alpha’s favorite brand by Market research firm Numerator, beating out brands like Owala and Fortnite. The company has capitalized on its TikTok fame without running into product shortages. As international demand soared last year, it opened a second export-focused factory to keep feeding global customers. And to stoke Buldak’s runaway popularity further, Samyang savvily partnered with restaurants and offered limited-release menu items at fried chicken chain bb.q Chicken and Panda Express. It was also the first Korean brand to become an official partner of Coachella 2025, where it hosted an activation booth and teamed up with performer GloRilla. Samyang also pushed out a global launch featuring refreshed packaging for its sauces and new product lines like chips. Last year its sales jumped 36%, with customers snatching up a whopping 9 billion units of Buldak products. 9. Cauldron Ferm For lowering the costs of industrial-scale biomanufacturing Cauldron Ferm is an Australia-based biomanufacturing company that aims to transform the way everyday goods are made using precision fermentation. That technique has been used for decades in pharmaceutical manufacturing, and now Cauldron Ferm, founded in 2022, is using it to produce bioproducts—everything from dairy proteins used in making cheese and ice cream to specialty chemicals that can go into sustainable aviation fuel. ​Precision fermentation uses microorganisms, like yeast, that have been programmed to produce specific molecules, such as proteins, enzymes, or peptides. In 2025, Cauldron Ferm demonstrated its hyper-fermentation technology by completing its first continuous campaign with a precision fermented protein at 10,000-liter scale, producing more volume at lower cost than conventional batch-fed systems.​ Over the past year, Cauldron Ferm has onboarded six new clients, ranging from startups to multinationals. It has also received notable government, including backing from Australian officials for an industrial facility in Mackay, Queensland, and a $1.76 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense to plan a commercial-scale facility in the United States. 10. Avko For giving businesses more affordable access to atmospheric water generators Water scarcity is emerging as one of the most urgent environmental and social challenges around the world as the climate crisis intensifies. Akvo Atmospheric Water Systems is tackling that problem in India and beyond. It’s one of many companies deploying Atmospheric Water Generators (AWGs) that collect airborne moisture, condense and purify it into drinking water. But it’s one of only a few that are focusing on making the technology more accessible where it’s needed most.​ In March 2025, Akvo launched a pay-as-you-go program called Water-on-Want (WoW), a service model for corporate customers like hotels and other commercial and industrial buildings. Rather than buying expensive hardware upfront, businesses can rent AWGs and pay only for the water consumed, which helps reduce the use of bottled water. Akvo’s technology powers more than 2,000 machines across 15 countries, producing close to 500,000 liters per day globally. Over roughly the past year, Akvo has nearly tripled its AWG deployments, showing strong demand for its approach to delivering an essential resource. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

The most innovative retailers in 2025 used technology not to chase trends, but to solve real problems. As tariffs squeezed margins and labor costs climbed, companies scrambled to adapt. Shopify opened its platform to agentic AI shoppers, letting customers purchase directly within ChatGPT. Amazon launched Lens Live to turn smartphones into instant product scanners. Rebel scaled its re-commerce platform into new categories, processing over 70,000 returned products weekly and keeping 25 million pounds of goods out of landfills. Others doubled down on heritage and experience. J.Crew proved nostalgia sells when paired with a carefully curated archive. Printemps brought its European department store model to Manhattan, where food and beverage now accounts for 35% of sales. Fanatics launched Fanatics Studios to produce sports content, creating new touchpoints to keep fans inside its ecosystem. On the operational side, Walmart insulated shoppers from trade wars by keeping grocery prices low while building higher-margin revenue streams. Its marketplace and advertising businesses grew 37% and 28% respectively, helping the company achieve e-commerce profitability for the first time. 1. Shopify For opening its doors to agentic AI shoppers As chatbots begin to reshape online shopping, Shopify is racing to ensure the five million merchants using its platform aren’t left behind. In fall 2025, Shopify introduced a partnership with ChatGPT that lets merchants sell directly within the chatbot, so customers can discover and buy products without ever leaving the platform. The company also launched a universal cart option that allows shoppers to add items from multiple retailers through a conversational interface whereby a bot can fill your cart rather than forcing you to hop between different websites. Behind the scenes, Shopify is also deploying AI to lighten the load for merchants. It built an AI-powered store builder that lets retailers build a functioning storefront by simply describing what they want. The company also upgraded Sidekick, its AI assistant, with voice chat capabilities in more than 20 languages, visual asset generation, and analytics support. The bet appears to be paying off: Shopify reported 9% year-over-year revenue growth in Q3, reaching $1.67 billion. Read more about ⁠Shopify, No. 3 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. Walmart For insulating shoppers from the trade wars In 2025, Walmart got better at being Walmart: keeping prices down, moving inventory faster, and leveraging its scale to weather storms. While tariffs squeezed competitors, the megachain kept grocery prices low to pull shoppers in, then built higher-margin businesses around them. Its marketplace and fulfillment services for third-party sellers grew 37%, while its advertising business—which leverages data from serving 90% of U.S. households—jumped 28%. The strategy worked: Walmart achieved e-commerce profitability for the first time and grew overall sales more than 5%. The company also leaned into AI where it actually matters. Sparky, an AI shopping assistant in the Walmart app, helps customers find products. Wally, an internal AI tool, helps merchants troubleshoot inventory issues in real time. And Walmart used its massive infrastructure to push delivery speeds faster—three-hour deliveries grew 91% year-over-year, with plans to reach 95% of the U.S. population by the end of fiscal 2026. Read more about ⁠Walmart, No. 9 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. Fanatics For parlaying its sports merch and collectibles into live events and film and television Most sports retailers stop at the jersey, but Fanatics is building an entertainment empire. In 2025, the sports merchandising giant’s annual fan festival, Fanatics Fest, nearly doubled attendance from 70,000 to over 125,000, signaling strong demand for live experiences beyond traditional retail. Now Fanatics has launched Fanatics Studios, a joint venture with OBB Media, with a mission to create, finance, produce, and distribute content at the intersection of sports and culture. Fanatics Studios, which projects over nine figures in revenue in its first year, arrived with deals already in place: co-producing the 2026 ESPY Awards with ESPN, creating original content for WWE’s digital platforms, and partnering with Major League Baseball on a 2026 World Baseball Classic docuseries. Looking ahead, Fanatics Studios will produce the official film for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic games, and is developing documentaries, live event specials, and digital series—proof that content isn’t a side project but a way to keep fans inside the Fanatics ecosystem while selling more merch in the process. 4. Square For updating its signature point-of-sale system to meet the needs of today’s retailers For most retailers, a point-of-sale system is just the thing that processes payments. Square wants to change that. After six years without launching a new point-of-sale device, the company unveiled Square Handheld—a pocket-sized business command center that weighs just 11 ounces. The device lets sellers manage everything from payments to inventory and back-of-house operations on the go, giving teams the speed and flexibility they need in fast-paced retail environments. The hardware is just the entry point. Square is building an entire ecosystem around modern retail needs, from accepting Bitcoin payments to launching AI-powered analytics that predict future sales and automate marketing campaigns. The company also rolled out subscription billing tools, recognizing that more businesses want to offer monthly boxes or memberships without juggling multiple platforms. That shift toward recurring revenue models is especially relevant for Square’s fastest-growing user base: content creators and small media businesses. The company now offers subscription management for premium content and exclusive newsletters, plus integrated social media tools that let creators share products and monetized content directly to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The numbers tell the story: In Q2 2025, Square sellers processed more than $64 billion in gross payment volume, pushing the company’s gross profit up 11% year-over-year to $1.03 billion. 5. J.Crew For using its heritage and legacy to sell customers updates to its classic styles Since J.Crew relaunched an iconic catalog in September 2024—with Demi Moore on the cover wearing one of her personal vintage J.Crew sweaters from the ’90s—the brand has been mining its own archive and doubled down on its heritage. The strategy came to life during New York Fashion Week 2025, when J.Crew transformed a landmark building in Lower Manhattan into a museum of its 40-year history. Visitors entered through a lobby lined with archival photography and vintage catalog pages before discovering the centerpiece: the Rollneck Generation campaign. The initiative celebrated the relaunch of J.Crew’s ’80s classic sweater with a roster of rising stars including Taylour Paige, Dominic Sessa, and Benito Skinner. Beyond the splashy activations, J.Crew launched the “J.Crew Archive” capsule—a collection that reissues beloved pieces like limited-edition denim jackets, flannel shirts, and striped tees. The brand also leaned into nostalgia on social media with #JCrewHeritage, encouraging customers to share their vintage finds and well-worn favorites. The Rollneck sweater alone generated 42,000 keyword searches during launch week, with Google searches spiking 900%. Overall, the heritage focus helped J.Crew drive a 20% increase in returning customers and 4-5% sales growth compared to the same quarter in 2024. 6. Printemps For reimagining the department store In March 2025, the French retailer opened its first U.S. location in Manhattan’s financial district, importing a European model that treats shopping as an experience rather than a transaction. The store is less than half the size of a typical American department store, with far less space devoted to clothing racks and cosmetics counters. The product selection is tightly curated—a quarter of its brands are either exclusive or new to the U.S.—and customers are encouraged to wander through a space designed to evoke a luxurious Parisian residence. What really sets Printemps apart, however, is the food. The Manhattan store houses five dining venues, including a Champagne bar, café, raw bar, and fine dining restaurant. And it’s not just window dressing: Food and beverage accounts for roughly 35% of overall sales at the New York location, proving that people will linger (and spend) when you give them a reason to stay. The approach has worked even in a tough market: Printemps told the Wall Street Journal that the first two months delivered sales “above our expectations.” 7. Rebel For diverting returns from landfills and putting them back on the market American retailers return about 17% of their inventory, or about 8.4 billion pounds of products annually, and most of it ends up in landfills, regardless of condition. Rebel is trying to change that math. The recommerce platform—which started as a baby gear business and expanded to home goods, travel products, and outdoor gear in 2025—processes more than 70,000 unique products weekly at its 300,000-square-foot warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. There, it turns returned and overstock goods into deals for budget-conscious shoppers. The volume is so substantial that Rebel’s website adds new deals every 15 minutes. To handle that scale, Rebel built an AI-powered system that detects, logs, and tags the condition of each return, then determines the most efficient path from retailer to consumer. The company’s smart-pricing algorithm auto-adjusts item prices based on demand, condition, and inventory more than 10 times daily, allowing Rebel to offer shoppers savings of up to 70% off retail prices. The growth has been steep: Rebel’s revenue increased 1,806% in just three years, and by August 2025, the company had already surpassed its entire 2024 revenue. 8. Amazon For using AI and personalization to help customers navigate the ‘everything store’ Navigating Amazon’s “everything store” has always meant wading through endless options. In 2025, Amazon used AI to flip that experience and let technology do the heavy lifting while shoppers sit back. In September, the retail giant launched Lens Live, which turns smartphones into real-time product scanners by letting you point your camera at any item and suggesting matching products directly in the camera view. The company’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, also got a major upgrade with Shopping Memory, which recalls past purchases, browsing history, abandoned carts, and even how much time shoppers spent looking at different items. Rufus can now ask clarifying questions, compare products across categories, and surface relevant deals based on individual shopping patterns. The assistant expanded to cover $700 billion worth of products and rolled out to 13 additional international marketplaces. Though it is a free service, Rufus has generated $700 million in operating profit in 2025. 9. Field.iO For creating easily deployed immersive retail experiences Creating an immersive retail experience used to cost $5 million and take two years to build. Field.io has collapsed that timeline to four months and $150,000. The London-based studio spent 15 years building custom digital environments for clients like Nike and Chanel. In 2025, it packaged that expertise into Lucient OS—a platform that transforms physical stores into intelligent, responsive spaces. The system uses anonymous sensors to track movement and behavior, then adjusts lighting, sound, projections, and even scent in real time. Since the AI processing happens on-site rather than in the cloud, customer data never leaves the building. For Nike, Field.iO built a centralized digital hub that manages immersive visuals across 94+ flagship stores globally. The platform can adapt to any screen size or architecture, which means new stores can deploy experiences quickly. Content shifts based on hyperlocal context while staying responsive to broader campaigns and product launches. The results: 40% operational efficiency gains and 47% conversion rate improvement. By reducing deployment time by 82% and costs by 97%, Field.iO is making these responsive retail experiences accessible to thousands of retailers who couldn’t previously afford them. 10. VenHub For creating the fully automated convenience store of the future VenHub is betting that the future of convenience stores doesn’t include humans—just robotic arms and algorithms. In 2025, the Las Vegas-based company opened five fully automated locations in Los Angeles, including Hollywood, Glendale, North Hollywood, the LAX/Metro Transit Center, and Union Station. The stores operate 24/7 without staff, and unlike traditional convenience stores, where products sit on open shelves vulnerable to theft, VenHub keeps everything behind bulletproof glass. Customers order through a touchscreen app, and robotic arms retrieve chips, soft drinks, basic medicines, or small electronics and hand them over within seconds. The unmanned model is resonating far beyond urban transit hubs dealing with labor costs and shoplifting. VenHub has racked up more than $400 million in pre-orders for its smart-store kiosks, with interest coming from unexpected places: a 200-person community in East Texas that doesn’t want to drive miles for sundries, and a gated Connecticut neighborhood where parents want a safe, walkable option for their kids to grab snacks. Since the stores require no employees and can be installed in just seven days, they’re ideal for locations that can’t support traditional staffing. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Automotive companies paving the way for self-driving cars are changing the rules of the road. Robotaxis went mainstream in 2025, delivering millions of rides around the world. Once fledgling startups, these providers have grown into fully mature businesses, and the competition is intensifying, especially between the robotaxi units of two global search engine juggernauts: Alphabet’s Waymo and Baidu’s Apollo Go. This year’s honorees took concrete action toward making the self-driving dream a reality across the world. They differ in approach—from how to build and operate the cars to how they should see and react to the world around them—but share the same goal. Best of all: Most passengers describe their rides as uneventful. Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, says that self-driving cars have reached an inflection point. Its Apollo Go ride-hailing service now operates more than 1,000 driverless vehicles across 22 cities, expanding further afield in Asia and entering the Middle East. Waymo crossed the 20 million-ride mark in December 2025, as it continues to roll out commercial operations in major U.S. cities and even test its vehicles in London and Tokyo. China’s WeRide, No. 9 on our list, now operates its fleet of purpose-built robotaxis in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. But this year’s crop of the world’s most innovative automotive companies highlights more than robotaxis. The companies we’ve chosen are streamlining the entire supply chain—from battery technology to manufacturing to the showroom floor—and developing the technology that will make 2026 easier. Legacy automakers continue to break ground too. Cadillac is doubling down on luxury with the launch of its $340,000, hand-built Celestiq electric sedan, while pushing into Formula One-level performance with its highly anticipated arrival to the high-end motorsport’s 2026 grid. Meanwhile, Hyundai is shoveling billions of dollars into its Metaplant in Bryan County, Georgia, where the South Korean carmaker is working to define the next era in mobility. 1. Waymo For scaling AVs across the United States Waymo’s growth in the U.S. and abroad accelerated in 2025, providing 1 million monthly rides and hitting the 20 million-ride milestone in December. During the year, Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle unit doubled its presence to 10 cities, expanding its operations to Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando—in addition to the 250,000 weekly paid rides it provides customers in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin. In October 2025, the company also announced plans for its first international launch, in London, with fully autonomous rides to begin later this year. Meanwhile, Waymo is laying the foundation for ride-hailing operations in more than 20 additional cities in 2026, from Baltimore to Boston to Buffalo as well as Tokyo. In August 2025, Waymo received a permit to begin testing its autonomous vehicles in New York City, an environment that will teach its system to learn to drive in snow and on congested highways. This year, Waymo also received authorization to begin testing rides in Las Vegas and launched rides for Waymo employees at San Jose and San Francisco airports. In November, Waymo launched fully autonomous rides for its employees at Miami International Airport, with plans to expand to more airports soon. 2. Baidu For scaling its driverless robotaxi technology, Apollo Go, across China and beyond Baidu is leading the charge toward large-scale deployment in the global robotaxi industry, transitioning to fully driverless operations in China in early 2025. Its Apollo Go ride-hailing service, which now operates more than 1,000 driverless vehicles across 22 cities, expanded its global footprint in 2025 across Asia, where rides in its dedicated, sub-$30,000 RT6 robotaxi are part of daily life for thousands of passengers in Wuhan—and into the Middle East, rolling out in Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai. In 2025, Baidu announced partnerships this year with both Uber and Lyft, with plans to roll out thousands more vehicles worldwide. The company’s strength lies in providing the artificial intelligence and software, not in mass production. The partnership-driven model allows for an asset-light approach that helps Apollo Go scale its fleet and global footprint faster. Apollo Go is the world’s largest ride-share service by all metrics—rides provided, cities served, and fleet operated—which provides significant competitive advantages in terms of collecting data, refining its technology, operational efficiency, and market positioning. Baidu said that Apollo Go safely logged over 240 million autonomous kilometers and provided more than 17 million rides to the public as of December 2025. 3. Hyundai For investing in EV manufacturing in the U.S. South Korean automaker Hyundai made headlines when it pledged to open a $12.6 billion Metaplant America in Georgia, the largest economic development project in the Peach State’s history. After years of working to break ground, Hyundai Motor Group opened the Metaplant in March in Bryan County, about 25 miles from Savannah. Of course, the campus includes a $7.6 billion EV manufacturing hub for Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis, electric and hybrid vehicles, but it’s home to all kinds of next-level innovation, from batteries to robotics. A $4.3 billion joint venture between Hyundai and LG Energy Solution is on track to produce lithium-ion cells for Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis models in 2026. The South Korean automaker plans to deploy Atlas humanoid robots, ‍developed by its Boston Dynamics unit, there starting in 2028, marking a step toward ⁠automating higher-risk and repetitive manufacturing tasks. This facility, which started production in late 2024, aims to build 500,000 vehicles annually and begin building hybrids in 2026. The move signals support for Hyundai’s American customers (despite recent controversy over the detention of hundreds of South Korean workers at a Georgia construction site in September), while finding a loophole around U.S. tariffs on imported Korean cars by building them stateside. 4. Cadillac For doubling down on luxury while pushing into F1-level performance At 124 years old, Cadillac is the oldest company on this list, disproving the aphorism about old dogs. In 2025, Cadillac seized the world stage with the reveal of a $340,000 bespoke electric vehicle, a throwback to the 1957 Eldorado Brougham, an emblem of American luxury and the last hand-built Cadillac. The Detroit brand hopes the Celestiq will capitalize on the brand’s legacy while catapulting the automaker into the future, even as the September 2025 elimination of a $7,500 federal tax credit for EV buyers calls the electrified future into question. The Celestiq puts up impressive figures—655 horsepower, an electric range of 303 miles, and a 0-to-60 sub four-seconds —but that’s nowhere near the performance chops expected in Cadillac’s next act: rebuilding American F1 participation from the ground up to join the FIA Formula One World Championship grid alongside Oracle Red Bull Racing, Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1, Scuderia Ferrari HP, and others. Cadillac will join for the season opener in Melbourne, Australia, in March as the sport’s 11th team, partnering with parent company General Motors and TWG Motorsports for a new era of American presence on the F1 grid. The team received final approval in March 2025 and will debut under the new technical regulations for the 2026 season with drivers Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas. 5. Czinger Vehicles For disrupting traditional automotive manufacturing through its software-driven approach Southern California startup Divergent is quietly revolutionizing manufacturing from the ground up. Founded by Kevin Czinger in 2014 as the world’s first end-to-end digital manufacturing platform, the company has perfected a proprietary process that combines AI and 3D printing to create lightweight, optimized parts for various industries, from automotive to defense to medical. The process eliminates expensive tooling and emphasizes rapid design, additive manufacturing, and automated assembly. Divergent’s pièce de résistance comes from its subsidiary, Czinger Vehicles, cofounded with son Lukas Czinger. The company’s first production vehicle, the 3D printed Czinger 21C hypercar, is a $2 million showpiece. Its twin-turbocharged V8 engine and three motors deliver 1,250 horsepower and rocket the car from 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds. In July 2025, the 21C set five track records in five days, including lap records at Laguna Seca and the legendary hill climb at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, becoming the fastest-ever street-legal hypercar. Divergent signed major contracts throughout 2025 and closed a Series E round in September at a $2.3 billion valuation, but the Czingers are only getting started, with hundreds of patents in their name. 6. Moment Energy For tackling clean battery recycling at scale Moment Energy is giving used EV batteries a “second life,” gearing up to launch large-scale manufacturing of stationary energy storage units. Founded in 2019 by four recent Simon Fraser University engineering graduates, the British Columbia-based energy company seeks to accelerate the repurposing of lithium-ion batteries into safe, high-performance, and compliant energy storage systems for commercial, industrial, and utility applications. The goal is to enable all of the world’s retired EV batteries to be repurposed by 2030. Working with customers such as Mercedes-Benz and Nissan, Moment Energy has 10 battery energy storage projects underway across North America, including at Vancouver International Airport and an off-grid installation at God’s Pocket Resort in British Columbia In July 2025, the company’s second-life battery energy storage system manufacturing hub in Vancouver reached full-scale production. Plans call for expanding its footprint to the U.S. by building the world’s first second-life gigafactory in Taylor, Texas, dedicated to repurposing retired EV batteries. In November 2025, Moment Energy announced a partnership with Copec Wind Ventures to repurpose batteries from Chile’s electric bus fleet—the second-largest globally—to deploy gigawatt-hours of second-life battery energy storage projects across Latin America and Europe as part of purportedly one of the largest EV fleet repurposing initiatives outside China. 7. LiCAP Technologies For transforming how EV batteries are made Sacramento, California-based LiCAP Technologies is pulling ahead in the race to optimize electrode manufacturing technologies for energy storage devices like EV batteries. Its Activated Dry Electrode process is designed to lower costs, reduce energy consumption, and decrease environmental impact compared to traditional wet slurry methods for producing electrodes. The method replaces the traditional solvent-based approach with a dry, roll-to-roll electrode system that eliminates drying ovens, solvents, and the massive energy load they demand. The result is a cleaner, faster, and more cost-effective manufacturing method: one that slashes carbon emissions and simplifies gigafactory design while improving performance and scalability across lithium-ion, solid-state, and sodium-ion batteries. In July, the company took a major step toward commercializing its Activated Dry Electrode process with funding from the California Energy Commission and in partnership with Dürr Systems. The support paves the way for large-scale manufacturing, a stage that often poses a bottleneck in battery technology commercialization. In August, LiCAP announced a strategic partnership with Nissan to develop and scale dry electrode technology for all-solid-state batteries. This marks a milestone in its mission to support the next generation of high-performance, cost-effective EVs. The batteries for Nissan are in development and slated to launch in vehicles in 2028. 8. Helm.ai For pioneering scalable next-generation AI software for autonomous driving California-based Helm.ai is developing next-generation AI software for autonomous driving without the costly equipment rivals use. In April 2025, the company introduced Helm.ai Driver, an AI system that can predict a car’s path in real time for both highway and city driving. Unlike traditional approaches that depend on expensive sensors or detailed pre-mapped roads, Helm.ai’s method uses only standard cameras, making it scalable as well as vehicle- and geography-agnostic. Helm.ai Vision, a modular, production-ready system that helps cars understand their surroundings in real time, followed in June 2025. Instead of using lidar or prebuilt HD maps like rival software makers, Helm.ai Vision integrates images from multiple cameras to create a bird’s-eye view map. The camera-reliant approach reduces costs significantly. Helm.ai Vision integrates with Helm.ai Driver to create a full-stack software system, from perception to path planning, used by customers such as Nvidia and Qualcomm. The hardware-lite approach could change the game for autonomous driving, producing safe, affordable AI-powered driving capabilities for millions of consumers worldwide. In August 2025, the company announced a multiyear joint development agreement with Honda. The vehicles will use Helm.ai’s full suite of AI technologies—Helm.ai Vision, Helm.ai Driver, and generative simulation, with production targeted for 2027. 9. WeRide For achieving true global scale with its ride-hailing app WeRide, one of China’s largest robotaxi companies, became in 2025 the world’s first to receive autonomous driving permits in eight markets: China, France, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE, and the United States, demonstrating global scalability for its WeRide Go ride-hailing app and purpose-built robo-vehicles. In February, it grew its vehicle lineup to four with the launch of Robovan W5, an autonomous delivery vehicle with Level 4 autonomous driving technology. In August, WeRide launched WePilot AiDrive, a one-stage end-to-end Advanced Driver Assistance System developed with Bosch. Unlike the traditional two-stage process of sensing and then decision-making, WePilot AiDrive integrates both functions, enabling vehicles to “see and act” at the same time. In March 2025, WeRide launched France’s first fully driverless L4 robobus with Renault Group. In September, WeRide launched China’s first 24-hour autonomous ride-hailing network in Guangzhou, as well as a robotaxi pilot in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, through Uber’s platform. The company also secured a robotaxi trial permit in Dubai, with fully driverless commercial operations targeted for 2026. WeRide and Uber now operate the Middle East’s largest robotaxi network using WeRide’s purpose-built, five-passenger GXR autonomous vehicle. Plans call for rapid scaling, with each GXR delivering dozens of trips during a 12-hour shift. 10. Numa For streamlining the sales experience for customers and dealers No one loves dealing with car dealerships, but Numa makes it a little less painful. The AI platform for automotive dealerships consolidates customer communications, including voice, text, and web chat, into a single, manageable inbox. Dealers like it too: Numa’s advanced AI agents automate key service tasks—from scheduling appointments to providing repair status updates—for quicker responses, streamlined operations, and stronger revenue. Numa followed the 2024 debut of its first AI Agent Platform with the October launch of its Expanded AI Agent Suite. These specialized agents divide and conquer. Some flag customers who might be ready for a trade-in or new purchase. Others convert technician repair notes into clear explanations. The “Write it for Me” Agent suggests ready-to-send text or email replies—even with humor when appropriate. The company says its AI team can help service departments overwhelmed by phone calls and voicemails recoup up to $1.17 million in lost annual revenue. It also introduced the first pay-for-performance AI model in automotive—dealerships only pay when the AI successfully books an appointment. In the past year, Numa tripled its integrations to work seamlessly with more than 90% of dealership systems, including on Stellantis’s MarketCenter portal. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Over the past year, tech companies invested hundreds of billions in the new data centers needed to power rapidly increasing demand for the technology. The investment is motivated in part by confidence that major AI labs such as those at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will continue to wring more intelligence out of their models. Indeed, fears have receded that the AI labs’ go-to strategy of supersizing models, training data, and computing power was no longer yielding large leaps in intelligence. Instead, the cadence of bigger and better models has accelerated, in part because AI coding tools are playing an increasing role in building new models. That’s certainly true at Anthropic, which says that 70% to 90% of its new code is now written by its breakthrough coding agent, Claude Code. The tool, which generates and tests software code based on natural language prompts, was originally meant for internal use by Anthropic engineers, but the company decided to release it as a real product in May 2025. In just six months, Claude Code became a moneymaker, reaching a $1 billion revenue run rate. Another reason for the acceleration in model releases was the arrival of Google at the front of the race. Its Gemini 3 family of models smoked competing LLMs on a number of industry benchmark tests, putting other AI labs on alert. The Gemini 3 models became the engine for many Google services, such as AI search and ads, and gave a boost to the company’s cloud business as well as to its Gemini chatbot. Other AI companies are specializing, honing their models for narrower use cases and skill sets. Hume AI, for example, has focused on emotional intelligence; its newest models are surprisingly good at both listening for a wide range of emotions in the human voice (say, a customer support caller), and generating voices that convey a range of emotions. World Labs, cofounded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has focused on models that understand the world very differently than large language models. The company has launched Marble, a “world model” capable of processing physical and spatial data in order to generate realistic world simulations that can be used to train self-driving cars or guide the movements of robots. 1. Google For creating an LLM that’s suitable for powering agents With the release of its Gemini 3 family of multimodal AI models, Google cemented its position as a dominant—and still rising—force in AI. The new models, which were developed by the company’s primary AI lab, Google DeepMind, and began deployment in November 2025, were meant to unify the multimodal, reasoning, and agentic properties introduced in the Gemini 1 and 2 models. They’re among the first to be trained from the ground up to process and understand images, video, audio, and code, not just text. The Gemini 3 models also offer the reasoning, planning, and ability to use tools (such as web search) needed to power AI agents. Gemini 3 now provides the brain for a number of Google’s core consumer-facing products, including the Gemini chatbot app, which now has more than 750 million monthly active users, and the AI Overviews in Google Search, which Google says now reach more than 2 billion users monthly. On the enterprise side, usage of Gemini 3 and other Google cloud models by independent developers and companies reportedly surged in 2025. Google says that Gemini Enterprise, a platform for enterprise search, AI assistants, and agents, has grown to 8 million paid seats. With a wealth of AI talent and a plethora of training data at its disposal, such as YouTube videos, Google is likely to seriously challenge OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI for frontier model dominance well into the future. Read more about Google, No. 1 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 2. Anthropic For developing the smartest coding agent Anthropic engineers originally built its popular Claude Code tool in late 2024 to test their models’ fluency with computer code. But when they saw that the tool, which generates code based on natural language prompts, dramatically sped up software development, they began using it for their own coding work. The company also kept improving the tool, and released it as a new product. “Since it became generally available last May, it’s changed how teams build and ship software,” says Anthropic chief product officer Mike Krieger, “and it’s now used by companies across industries.” Customers include Netflix, Spotify, Salesforce, KPMG, and many other major names, along with thousands of startups. Claude Code improved with the November 2025 release of the Claude Opus 4.5 model, and saw an even bigger boost with Opus 4.6, announced in early February. Users say the tool is now more efficient and can handle complex coding tasks that require prior reasoning and planning. It’s now a significant revenue generator for Anthropic, which reportedly expects to become profitable in 2028. “Surpassing $1 billion in six months tells us that this isn’t about experimentation, it’s just how developers work now,” Krieger says. Read more about Anthropic, No. 4 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 3. Abridge For relieving doctors of chart-work drudgery Abridge is applying enterprise-grade AI to one of the biggest contributors to burnout of physicians and other caregivers—filling out patient charts. Caregivers can record patient visits using their phone. The Abridge platform then summarizes the information and completes the electronic patient record. Clinicians using the platform report spending 60% less time completing patient notes after hours and report an 85% increase in work satisfaction, the company says. That results in a 67% overall reduction in burnout. Abridge projects that its platform will support more than 80 million patient-clinician conversations at 250 of the largest U.S. health systems in 2026. In April 2025, the company introduced a new AI architecture, called Contextual Reasoning Engine, that uses more clinical context to turn visit data into compliant, billable notes in real time. It’s also released add-on modules that make the platform more performant in specific clinical contexts, including Abridge Inside for Emergency Medicine and Abridge Inside for Inpatient. When scrutinizing patient visit summaries, Abridge says its platform caught 97% of errors and unsupported statements, while an off-the-shelf model, OpenAI’s GPT-4o, caught just 82%. The company closed a $250 million funding round in 2025, and reached $38 million in annualized recurring revenue in Q3 2025, with a 95%+ month-over-month retention rate. Read more about Abridge, honored as No. 19 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 4. World Labs For transforming text, photos, and videos into 3D worlds Many AI practitioners believe that today’s AI models will need to grow beyond words and develop an understanding of the spatial and physical world. One of these people is Fei-Fei Li, the AI pioneer whose ImageNet training dataset laid the foundation for new computer vision systems in the early 2010s. Li started World Labs with well-known AI researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall. The startup is building a form of “world model” capable of processing sensory data and developing a physics-based understanding of the real world. It released its first world model, Marble, in 2025. It focuses on generating and maintaining highly realistic 3D environments that can be used by creatives to develop interactive games and visual effects. Ultimately, the greatest beneficiaries of World Labs’ models might be robotics companies, which currently struggle to prepare robots for real-world utility. “You need a 3D environment that is interactable, that has collisions, has physics, has dynamics to train robots, to evaluate robots,” says Li. “This is the reason spatial intelligence is important for humans and it will be important for AI. The use cases are just abundant.” Read more about World Labs, honored as No. 22 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026. 5. Cerebras Systems For baking big chips for big AI Cerebras is best known for making the market’s largest AI chip, meaning it occupies most of a whole silicon wafer, which is about the size of a dinner plate (other AI chips, like Nvidia’s GPUs, are baked onto much smaller pieces of the silicon wafer). The large square chip packs a lot of processing power and memory on one piece of silicon, so almost no time is wasted routing data between separate chips. That makes it highly effective at processing data from commercial AI applications that require massive throughput and very fast response times. Cerebras says its chips can process 2,500 to 3,000 tokens per second, more than 70 times faster than the best GPUs. For years, Cerebras sold its technology mainly to national labs and R&D organizations that needed supercomputing power for research. But over the past 18 months, the company has increasingly filled the growing demand for computing power for commercial AI apps such as chatbots and coding assistants. For example, OpenAI recently began using a large installation of Cerebras servers to process real-time user interactions with its Codex coding assistant. In February 2025, Cerebras said that it planned to launch six new inference data centers. At least four of them—Dallas, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, and Montreal—were online by the end of the year. Its customer list now includes IBM, Meta, Perplexity, Mayo Clinic, Notion, AbbVie, G42, Mistral, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, and AstraZeneca. In September 2025, the company raised a $1.1 billion funding round at an $8.1 billion valuation. Then in early 2026, it announced another $1 billion round at a post-money valuation of around $23 billion. 6. Alibaba Group For bringing its Qwen AI models to the cloud Qwen, from the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Group, is a world-class family of large language models. Alibaba has developed a whole stack of infrastructure software around the models so that they can be more easily deployed within enterprises. It now open-sources Qwen, calling it the “operating system of the AI era.” As Asia-Pacific’s largest cloud provider and the world’s fourth largest, Alibaba has released more than 300 AI models spanning text, image, video, and audio generation. The company says Qwen has been downloaded more than 600 million times, and has spawned over 170,000 derivative models. More than a million developers use Model Studio, Alibaba Cloud’s platform for building and deploying AI apps using Qwen. In June 2025, Alibaba launched a strategic alliance with SAP, which now integrates Qwen into its SAP AI Core, a service layer for deploying and running AI workloads, in China and, soon, globally. A groundbreaking BMW partnership embeds Qwen into the carmaker’s 2026 Neue Klasse vehicles, the first time a global automaker has embedded an open-source LLM directly into in-car systems. Qwen is also having an impact in healthcare. The models have improved the diagnostic accuracy of PANDA cancer screening by 34.1% and reduced misdiagnoses by an acute aortic syndrome tool from 50% to 4.8%. 7. Darktrace For turning LLMs into security workers Darktrace may have been ahead of its time when it launched its Cyber AI Analyst in 2019. By 2025, the agentic security system had conducted 90 million investigations and was able to reduce them to fewer than 500,000 incidents that it deemed critical. Now Darktrace is turning its focus to security threats in the cloud, where the majority of AI models and apps are hosted. In September 2025, the company launched Forensic Acquisition & Investigation, which it says is the industry’s first fully automated forensic solution for cloud computing. The system is designed to instantly capture and preserve evidence of a security breach so that researchers can establish the root cause and timeline of a cyberattack and investigate it across different commercial clouds and on-premises computer systems. Darktrace also added a new custom large language model called DEMIST-2 that enables a deeper understanding of cybersecurity threats and orchestrates the use of agents in complex investigations. Darktrace’s security technology protects about 10,000 organizations globally from sophisticated threats to cloud, email, network, and operational technology systems. 8. Mithril For developing algorithms to keep the servers working around the clock, more efficiently One of the fundamental challenges in the AI industry is the extremely high cost of training and operating large models. Not only is there an undersupply of the silicon chips needed to do the work, but cloud providers sell access to compute power in rigid ways that can leave servers idle. Mithril’s idea is to aggregate computing power from cloud providers into a marketplace and sell it in flexible ways. For instance, if an AI lab needs cloud resources for a job that can run piecemeal, it might get a lower price than another workload that’s time-sensitive and must run uninterrupted until completion. Mithril says usage of its platform has grown by more than 550% over the past year. Its customers include well-known AI companies such as Cursor, Poolside, and Pika. It also serves a growing number of enterprises such as LG AI Research and research institutions such as Arc Institute, Stanford, and Broad Institute. Mithril, which was founded by former Google DeepMind research scientist Jared Quincy Davis, has raised $80 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Microsoft Ventures (M12), and NEA, among others. 9. Lila Sciences For integrating generative AI with lab robotics Generative AI has the potential to conceive of novel molecule combinations that form the basis for new and more effective drug therapies. But in drug discovery, the AI must extend from the digital realm to conduct physical experiments that validate the candidates. Lila Sciences describes its AI Science Factory as the first “operating system for autonomous science” capable of driving open-ended scientific exploration. Its integration of hardware and software innovation creates a closed loop where AI designs hypotheses, executes experiments, and incorporates results into new cycles of discovery. The system autonomously runs thousands of experiments simultaneously. In March 2025, Lila Sciences announced four breakthrough discoveries, all achieved through AI. They include optimal genetic medicine constructs outperforming commercial therapeutics, discovery of hundreds of novel antibodies and peptides, unique non-platinum catalysts for green hydrogen at a far lower cost, and world-class carbon capture materials. The company says it marked the first time in history that AI, not humans, was the driving force behind scientific milestones. Lila Sciences launched in March 2025 with $200 million in seed capital from General Catalyst and others, then raised another $350 million from investors such as In-Q-Tel in October. 10. FieldAI For giving robots brains for the real world Unlike other robotics companies, FieldAI isn’t trying to reverse engineer new large language models to be the brains for robots. Rather, its Field Foundation Models (FFMs) are grounded in physics. In practice this means its models make robots keenly aware of the physical risks in their environment so that they can operate safely and effectively in “dull, dirty, and dangerous (DDD) environments,” as the company puts it, without requiring GPS, maps, or constant human oversight. The FFMs can be placed in all kinds of robots including quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots, and passenger-scale platforms. FieldAI CEO Ali Agha has said that his company already has more than 200 customer deployments across North America, Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, including some of the largest construction firms in China and the U.S. In August 2025, FieldAI raised $405 million from top-tier investors including Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, and Samsung. The company was founded in 2023 as a 30-person team with members from Google, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, SpaceX, Zoox, and Cruise. It’s grown to more than 100 people. 11. Runway For pushing the envelope in production-ready video generation Even as competition heats up from players like Google and OpenAI, Runway continues to set the pace for generative video. The company improved on its previous flagship models in 2025 with the release of Gen-4, which lets creators generate or edit video using text prompts and/or reference images, and then iterate and edit within a production-style workflow. The new models were designed to address a key limitation of existing models—limited ability to maintain the consistency of people, objects, and environments across multiple shots. Runway is likely the generative video company that’s most deeply entrenched in the advertising and entertainment industries, thanks to partnerships with Lionsgate, EDGLRD, Fabula, and AMC Networks. Amazon reportedly used Runway tools in the production of House of David season 2, and they were also used to create visual effects for Madonna and Beyoncé. On the enterprise side, Runway has been working with Microsoft, Ubisoft, Dolce & Gabbana, Puma, Under Armour, Valentino, and others. In April 2025, Runway raised $308 million in Series D funding at a $3.3 billion valuation, more than doubling its valuation from the previous round. And in February 2026, it raised another $315 million at a valuation of roughly $5.3 billion. 12. OpenEvidence For giving doctors an AI consultant trained in peer-reviewed studies OpenEvidence is a chatbot-style quick reference guide used by physicians and other clinicians. Caregivers can type a clinical question in natural language and get summarized answers that are grounded in peer-reviewed medical research. That’s because the information in the company’s model comes via content deals that give OpenEvidence access to the JAMA Network and The New England Journal of Medicine. In 2025, the company launched OpenEvidence DeepConsult, a deep research mode for more complex clinical questions. The tool deploys a team of specialized “PhD-level AI agents” that can search through hundreds of research reports and then stitch together a coherent, actionable answer. The company also released OpenEvidence Visits, which lets physicians easily access medical evidence and form decisions during patient exams. OpenEvidence became a part of the workflow of many doctors during 2025. The company says 40% of U.S. doctors now log in daily. That popularity didn’t go unnoticed within venture capital circles. In July 2025, the company raised $210 million at a valuation of approximately $3.5 billion. It raised another round, led by Thrive Capital and DST Global, in January 2026, which pushed its valuation up to $12 billion and brought its funding total to nearly $700 million. 13. GC AI For empowering in-house legal teams with truth-grounded AI Many of the strongest startups are started by people who had a personal need for the company’s product. That’s the case with GC AI, whose name refers to AI for general counsels, the corporate world’s top in-house lawyers. GC AI was cofounded by Cecilia Ziniti, who was general counsel in Amazon’s Alexa division, at the coding assistant company Replit, and at the autonomous driving company Cruise. GC AI’s product focuses squarely on the main responsibilities of lawyers within enterprise settings. Users can enter a chatbot-style ask-and-answer session and get answers rooted in their company’s own policies, products, and practices. The software summarizes and analyzes documents (customers report a 50% reduction in document drafting and review time), and generates first drafts of legal correspondence such as emails, clauses, and memos. Perhaps most importantly, GC AI establishes trust through a key 2025 innovation called the Exact Quote system, which ensures that every clause, citation, and contract reference comes verbatim from verified sources. More than 700 legal teams now use the platform, with notable customers including SurveyMonkey, Penguin Random House, and Vuori. GC AI raised $11.6 million in venture funding in May 2025, and another $60 million round in November, bringing its funding total to $73 million. 14. Factory For imbuing software development agents with new flexibility Factory’s AI platform is used by software developers to create and delegate tasks to teams of autonomous agents (“Droids”). The agents rely on a shared memory graph to plan, build, and ship software, and developers can use it within familiar interfaces such as the computer terminal and Slack. The platform is “model agnostic,” meaning that it can integrate major generalist models like ones from OpenAI or Anthropic, or smaller, task-focused models. The secret sauce comes from the contextual intelligence and multi-agent reasoning built into Factory’s proprietary agentic architecture. In 2025, the company notched a big performance milestone, going to No. 1 on the Terminal-Bench benchmark by outperforming major competitors in multi-agent collaboration, debugging, and infrastructure tasks. Factory is still a young company—it was founded in 2023—but it showed up just in time to play a role in the agentic phase of generative AI that followed the chatbot craze. The startup said in 2025 that it anticipated hitting a $25 million annual recurring revenue (ARR). Its customers include Bayer, EY, MongoDB, and Nvidia. It’s raised around $70 million from some pedigreed investors, including Lux Capital, Sequoia Capital, NEA, J.P. Morgan, and Nvidia, which suggests that the startup has established credibility as a platform that could help define the next era of human-AI collaboration in engineering. 15. Turing For bringing human brains to AI training Turing began life as a talent platform that matched and vetted remote software engineering talent for tech company and enterprise clients. With the AI boom that started after the launch of ChatGPT, it quickly reimagined itself as a different, but complimentary kind of platform that serves expert-driven AI training data to major AI labs such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic. In 2025, the company evolved further to become an “AI research accelerator” that helps AI labs identify model weaknesses and engineer custom training data solutions. One way it does this is through “data gyms,” which are something like flight simulators for AI agents. The gym can put AI agents through numerous use case scenarios and collect feedback data on their performance, which can be used to develop clean “this worked, this didn’t” signals for training and evaluation. Turing also launched a new model fine-tuning platform called ALAN (Always Learning, Always Nimble), which it says has revolutionized the way it captures expert knowledge and transforms it into training data. The Palo Alto-based company has been growing rapidly during the past two years as the race among AI labs to reach artificial general intelligence has picked up. It’s grown to 4,000 employees, says it hit a $300 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) during 2025, and is profitable. Turing picked up another $111 million in venture capital funding in March 2025 at a $2.2 billion valuation. 16. Cohere For creating private and secure AI models for companies The Canadian AI lab Cohere was cofounded by Aidan Gomez, who was one of the Google researchers who coauthored the seminal Transformers paper that touched off the generative AI boom. Cohere’s models don’t normally show up at the top of industry benchmark tests alongside those from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, but the company has made a very smart pivot toward “sovereign AI,” in which security- and privacy-conscious companies can host their data and AI models within their own private cloud or on servers located within their security perimeter. This is especially important to enterprises in regulated industries that must meet strict security and governance standards for customer data. Cohere is also working hard to let enterprises do more with their protected data. In January 2025, it released North, an agentic AI platform that lets enterprises search company data and automate tasks using AI. North moved to general commercial availability in August, and RBC and LG are now reportedly running pilots with the platform. In August, Cohere announced a $500 million raise, followed by an additional $100 million second close in September, bringing total funding to $1.6 billion at a $7 billion valuation. 17. Snorkel AI For preparing AI models for the enterprise by harnessing specialized, research-backed datasets Expectations for applying AI models to real-world tasks in the workplace are running high in 2026, and a lot of money is riding on it. AI labs can no longer rely on increases in the amount of training data or computing power to prepare their models for critical, and diverse, real-world use cases. So they’re increasingly training models on highly specialized data developed by domain experts to continue making progress. The market research firm IDC projects that AI labs will spend $150 billion a year on such data by 2027. One of the companies addressing this market is Snorkel AI, which creates custom training datasets for many of the leading AI labs and AI app developers. The company creates its specialty domain data, which can be used to “challenge, teach, and evaluate” AI models during their training, with the help of a global network of more than 5,500 experts representing more than a thousand knowledge areas. In 2025, Snorkel released a new product called Expert Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), which quickly delivers customized datasets to match specific training needs as well as reinforcement learning environments for testing models on specific tasks and gathering feedback data. In 2025, Snorkel raised a $100 million round at a $1.3 billion valuation from firms such as Addition, Prosperity 7 Ventures, and existing investors Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. 18. Hume AI For infusing emotion and inflection into its voice model As AI matures, it’s likely that more people will begin talking to AI apps rather than typing to them. But right now, AI models in general aren’t great at detecting emotion in a human user’s voice. Nor do they nail the emotion they should synthesize into their voice during a response. That’s why Hume AI has become an important company in the industry. It saw these conditions coming. The New York-based startup has been developing models that generate emotionally correct voices and listen for emotion in human voices. In 2025, Hume released Octave 2, which, unlike traditional text-to-speech models, understands how the language in a script informs the tune, rhythm, and timbre of the voice that’s speaking it, inferring when to whisper secrets, shout triumphantly, or calmly explain a fact. Its model is trained to hear more than 200 emotions and 400 voice characteristics. The end result is that users can have a back-and-forth with an AI that sounds and feels more like a conversation with a warm-blooded human being. Hume has so far held three funding rounds with investors including Union Square Ventures, EQT Ventures, USV, Comcast Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and others, raising nearly $80 million, according to PitchBook. But the biggest validation of Hume’s AI may be the fact that Google licensed the company’s models, and also recruited Hume CEO Alan Cowen and several other Hume researchers to work within its Google DeepMind AI group. Hume’s new CEO is Andrew Ettinger. 19. Decart For turning raw video into AI-infused video in real time Decart develops a full-stack AI video platform that can intake live video—from a Zoom call, perhaps—and affect, restyle, and regenerate it in real time. Its Mirage model might reskin the person in the frame as an animal or a cartoon character. Or Decart’s AI models might intake a webcam feed or stream and instantly change the environment into an anime or cyberpunk scene, with near-zero latency. In 2025, Decart released Mirage, which it bills as the world’s first real-time autoregressive video-to-video model. It uses generative AI to let a user enter prompts to shift the style of the video in real time, while maintaining the original video’s structure, motion, and frame rate. Decart is now working with AWS to integrate its real-time generative video and world-model technology into Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that makes various AI models available to AWS customers through an API. Decart was given early access to Amazon’s Trainium 3 chips so that its models could run well on them. The Israeli company, which was founded in 2023, says it’s already been generating “tens of millions” in annual revenue from a proprietary acceleration technology that lets customers run AI workloads faster and cheaper on GPUs. But it’s also licensing its Mirage model to gaming, real estate, and film companies to create live simulations. In July 2025, Decart raised $100 million at a valuation of $3.1 billion from investors including Sequoia Capital and Benchmark, bringing its total to $153 million. 20. Reflection AI For open-sourcing the AI frontier 2025 was the year that AI coding assistants became good enough to take a major role, alongside human engineers, in building software. However, most of these systems are built on top of closed-source, general AI models that lack transparency and can’t be modified or built upon. Reflection AI is building an open-source alternative to those models, and it’s starting with models that specialize in computer code. While popular coding models such as Claude Code and Cursor are focused on quickly generating code, Reflection’s flagship model, called Asimov, focuses on the harder problem of understanding existing enterprise codebases—often millions of lines and hundreds of interconnected systems deep. It can also read emails, Slack messages, project updates, and code documentation to develop a broader contextual understanding of how the company thinks about developing software. Some of Reflection’s team members worked on Google DeepMind’s famous AlphaGo model and helped train Google’s flagship Gemini model using reinforcement learning. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said Reflection has “one of the best teams in the world,” describing the founders—Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou—as “god tier” researchers. The company came out of stealth in March 2025 with $130 million in funding at a $555 million valuation, and six months later it raised another $2 billion from Nvidia, DST, Lightspeed, and Sequoia at an $8 billion valuation—one of the largest Series B AI funding rounds ever. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

Augmented and virtual reality companies continue to harness the technology for everything from family entertainment to healthcare and workplace safety. Xreal’s wearable displays offer users new options for integrating AR with workflows and devices, and RayNeo’s ultralight AR glasses deliver AI features and a stunning 43-inch virtual display. AR and VR are even creating innovative forms of entertainment. Cosm has built “shared reality” domes that let spectators immerse themselves in sports and movies as if they were in the stadium or scene, and Immotion’s VR shows bring education and entertainment to a host of zoos and museums. Virtuix takes VR entertainment to the home gym, with a variety of games available to play—and exercise with—on its omnidirectional treadmill hardware. In the workplace, AR and VR are making employee training and product prototyping safer and more efficient. Squint offers easy creation of practical demos for manufacturing workers, and Loft Dynamics‘ VR simulators expand training options for helicopter and airplane pilots. Dassault Systèmes helps designers and engineers explore even complex industrial products virtually before they assemble costly prototypes. And TechSee’s technology lets internet service providers and customers troubleshoot their Wi-Fi connections using private digital twins of their home networks. Meanwhile, XRHealth is bringing XR-powered physical and behavioral treatments to patients in medical facilities and at home. 1. Cosm For bringing truly immersive sports and entertainment to venues around the country Cosm operates immersive “shared reality” venues that, thanks to 87-foot diameters, 12K+ resolution LED domes, and partnerships with major sports leagues and broadcasters, can make fans feel like they’re at the game without making the trek to the stadium, even for championship events. The experience comes complete with high-end sports-bar-style food and drink. But the action isn’t limited to sports: Thanks to a partnership with Warner Bros. Pictures, Cosm also debuted a shared-reality version of the science-fiction film The Matrix last year, in time for its 25th anniversary, and screened a version of the family-friendly classic 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. The screenings included immersive visual elements extending the movies beyond the standard two-dimensional rectangular screen, providing a new incentive for audiences to go to the movies instead of streaming at home. In 2025, Cosm also announced new partnerships with leagues, including WWE and the PGA Tour, as well as new multiyear deals with the NFL, NBA, and Fox Sports. Cosm also began construction on new dome venues in Detroit and Atlanta, adding to the installations the company already operates in Los Angeles and Dallas. A fifth location is slated for Cleveland. By the start of 2025, Cosm had raised more than $300 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. 2. Loft Dynamics For employing virtual reality to train the next generation of aircraft pilots Loft Dynamics builds virtual reality training platforms for aircraft pilots. In April 2025, it announced an investment from and partnership with Alaska Airlines as they build the first hyperrealistic VR simulator for the popular Boeing 737. Loft also began work on a simulator for the Airbus A320 and released the first VR simulator for the Airbus H145, one of the world’s most popular helicopters. A new program with the Los Angeles Police Department, announced in March 2025, enables LAPD pilots to train within a full-scale virtual replica of the Airbus H125 helicopter. Loft announced in September that its H125 simulator has been qualified at the highest level of pilot training devices by the Federal Aviation Administration. In November, Loft also announced plans to develop Apple Vision Pro software for home practice. The company’s technology is used at Marshall University, the first U.S. university to integrate such a platform for aspiring pilots. Loft says its technology costs less than 10% of the hourly cost of physical aircraft for training pilots, while improving trainee safety even in complex emergency maneuvers. This helps address the ongoing shortage of qualified aircraft pilots and high training costs. 3. XRHealth For harnessing extended reality technology for new forms of healing More than 1 million therapy sessions have been delivered using XRHealth’s platform. It offers virtual reality sessions to help patients with chronic pain management, physical rehabilitation, and mental health issues including anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD. And in February 2025 following a string of acquisitions, the company announced the acquisition of RealizedCare, specializing in chronic pain and behavioral health. XRHealth’s platform integrated RealizedCare’s services and RealizedCare’s AI-powered triage system that can redirect patients to effective digital treatments or human clinicians as needed. In August 2025, XRHealth unveiled version 2.0 of its platform, unifying its therapeutic modules under one software umbrella designed for future extensibility and ease of patient and provider use. The move followed the debut of a new line of durable medical equipment after Medicare approved payments for at-home VR cognitive behavioral therapy devices. In September, it released its XR CareCart, a plug-and-play device designed for use in hospitals and clinics with minimal need for IT setup. And in October, the company, which works with more than 2,000 clinicians around the world, announced that the Department of Veterans Affairs had approved its programs for use in VA clinics or at home. 4. Xreal For giving users unprecedented control over their augmented reality displays Augmented reality glasses maker Xreal has sold nearly 700,000 pairs of AR spectacles. And in June 2025, it released its Xreal One Pro AR glasses, a follow-up to December 2024’s Xreal One base line. The Xreal One devices can create a virtual display in conjunction with nearly any device that can provide video over USB-C, from gaming systems to work computing equipment. Its X1 chips allow for spatial anchoring—fixing a virtual screen in a physical place—and extensive control of the virtual screen from the glasses, along with extremely low blur even as users move their heads. An optional Xreal Eye camera, released in mid-2025, allows for even greater control of the virtual screen, which can adjust as users move closer to it or walk around it, thanks to AI features that help enable the seamless adjustments. The camera can also let users take pictures and shoot video with the glasses. In 2026, the company will debut Project Aura, a collaboration with Qualcomm to build a set of optical see-through AR glasses powered by Google’s Android XR software. The eyewear will feature a 70-degree field of view virtual screen, the largest Xreal has delivered. 5. Immotion For bringing the wonder of nature to museums and zoos through virtual reality Immotion operates more than 140 seated, theatrical VR installations showcasing such family-friendly fare as animals, including sharks, dinosaurs, and polar bears, at museums, zoos, aquariums, and similar institutions around the world. Having served more than 3 million people in 2025 alone, the company has developed filming technology to create VR movies in difficult but fascinating environments. These have included underwater housings to shoot alongside polar bears, a concealed rock camera to capture migrating herds of animals on the Maasai Mara, and a remote-controlled boat camera to capture crocodiles and hippos upon rivers. The company also developed new postproduction technology enabling smoother transitions, even for movies offering 360 degrees of vision, and audio mixes based on gaze tracking. It also rolled out a new suite of audience tracking systems, designed to let institutions offer programming that best suits their visitors and adjust for seasonality, as well as a set of automated diagnostic tools that helps keep systems up and running. The company also developed three new titles to be shown at partner zoos, aquariums, and museums—including Dinosaur:Evolution, launched in July, and Dolphins of the Reef, which debuted in May—throughout 2025, and developed lesson plans for schools tied to its programming and to local curricular material. 6. RayNeo For packing a virtual 43-inch display—and lots of AI features—into a pair of ultralight AR glasses Augmented reality glasses maker RayNeo, which claims a 39% share of the global AR glasses market, launched its RayNeo X3 Pro glasses in May 2025. The device, which RayNeo calls “the world’s lightest mass-produced full-color MicroLED diffraction waveguide AR glasses,” weighs in at just 76 grams (or roughly 2.68 ounces). The company’s partnership with Applied Materials has led to AR glasses that can be worn comfortably to deliver a virtual 43-inch display in all environments, including in direct sunlight. The device supports augmented reality and artificial intelligence features that help users to do more without pulling out their phones, including near-real-time audio and visual translation of 14 languages, enabling users to read signs or understand conversations. AI can provide information about objects in the real world, create onboard navigation that can show directions overlaid on actual walking paths, and facilitate payments with a mix of spoken commands and glances at payment QR codes. The glasses also feature integrations with the Apple Watch as well as a custom version of the Android operating system that runs apps like Instagram and WhatsApp directly on the glasses. 7. Squint For using AR to unlock institutional wisdom in manufacturing Squint’s platform for the manufacturing sector transforms sources of knowledge like manuals and videos into step-by-step instructions and AI assistance; it has been used on the factory floor at clients like PepsiCo, Michelin, and Schneider Electric. Last January, it unveiled AI step verification features, which use computer vision to verify proper procedure execution before errors can compound across processes. The company also released an enhanced AI copilot that can deliver personalized instructions and guidance for users based on who and even where they are; anyone from a maintenance worker to a factory inspector can get the information they need when they need it. Squint also enhanced its integrations with Apple’s Siri, making it easier for users to access Squint features without needing to use their hands. Its technology is now deployed at more than 250 factories and used by tens of thousands of manufacturing workers every day. Squint announced a $40 million Series B funding round in August 2025 and plans to expand into areas like energy and logistics and continue enhancing its AI features. 8. Dassault Systèmes For letting manufacturers explore complex industrial designs in virtual reality Dassault Systèmes has long been a leading provider of computer-aided design and 3D visualization software for companies building cars, planes, and even drugs. In 2025, the company released 3DLive, an application for the Apple Vision Pro that enables users to visualize and collaborate on complex industrial designs and prototypes in virtual reality, saving the need for some physical prototyping and costly on-site visits. The software uses physics and lighting modeling to accurately represent how objects will look and behave in the real, physical world. Examples include an automotive client that identified a design issue and prevented costly physical rework while cutting prototyping time by 22%. Moreover, an aerospace firm was able to virtually bring together stakeholders from three continents to examine a prototype airplane interior, saving $450,000 in travel costs. The technology also helped a medical technology maker let surgeons virtually try out new surgical instruments, providing feedback before physical prototypes were even constructed. Last year, the company unveiled 3D UNIV+RSES, a system enabling generative AI to work with its ecosystem of 3D virtual twins of real-world designs and products. 9. TechSee For helping customers and technicians harness AI and AR to fix knotty Wi-Fi issues In February 2025, customer service technology company TechSee unveiled Connectivity Guru, a tool using computer vision and augmented reality to build a privacy-sensitive digital twin of users’ homes, complete with information about Wi-Fi hot spots, dead zones, and interference sources. The digital twin is constructed using an ordinary smartphone to capture visual information and signal data. This enables field techs and customer service agents at internet providers to diagnose connectivity problems, often without needing to physically visit the customer’s home. Images are stored as anonymized heat maps, with no images of the customer’s home kept on file. TechSee says its clients like Verizon and Vodafone have seen truck rolls cut by more than 20% and first-time fix rates jump by more than 30%, all while customer churn at onboarding decreases and satisfaction scores rise. It’s a significant savings for internet providers, with site visits costing an estimated $200 to $500. Customers can even use the technology themselves, with an AI agent helping to set up their Wi-Fi and address problems. Leading global telecom providers have used TechSee’s technology across millions of interactions and large-scale self-installations. 10. Virtuix For giving home gamers a 3D VR workout At the start of last year, virtual reality company Virtuix began shipping the Omni One, a full-body home game system built around an omnidirectional treadmill system. Wearing virtual reality headsets and sensor-enabled overshoes, players could explore a library that soon grew to 55 games, from action and adventure to sports simulators. The Mark Cuban-backed company has shipped more than $20 million in products and reported that revenue was up 138% year over year in the six months ending in September. In March 2025, Virtuix announced Omni Mission Trainer, a simulator designed for group military training, with an innovation unit of the Air Force already collaborating on evolution of the platform. Work on civilian games has continued as well, with Virtuix debuting Treks in April 2025. The experience allows players to burn real calories while walking through simulated versions of New York City and sites like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. The device’s health and weight-loss benefits helped it become eligible for purchase using Health Savings Account (HSA) and Flexible Spending Account (FSA) money, Virtuix announced in September. Last summer, it announced it had raised more than $3 million through an offering to small investors, and Virtuix stock began trading on the Nasdaq exchange in January. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article