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You know the dream: electric vehicles that can drive straight from New York to Chicago without needing to top off the battery. Robotaxis at your beck and call. Amphibious cars. The promise of next-generation travel hasn’t fully materialized yet, but legions of companies around the world are focused on bringing the vision to life. This year’s list of the most innovative automotive companies recognizes both the upstarts and the incumbents advancing the next era in mobility. As the industry grapples with the larger questions of how to create viable solid-state batteries or commercialize robotaxi service, the companies listed here are focused on the incremental steps toward a fully autonomous future. The result is EV technology that makes the erstwhile novelty car more powerful, more affordable, and more ubiquitous. China’s largest car company, BYD, became the world’s second-biggest EV maker in 2024 due to the rollout of its ultra-affordable models such as the $11,000 Seagull as it grows its global footprint. Meanwhile, Southern California-based startup Rivian is disrupting the domestic EV industry with ultraefficient battery packs that can carry its pickup trucks and SUVs more than 400 miles on a full charge. Some companies, like Northbrook, Illinois-based UL Solutions, are focused on making batteries safer and more reliable, while others focus on what to do with the batteries once they reach the end of their life cycle. Mercedes-Benz, which returns to the list for the second consecutive year, became the first car manufacturer to close the loop with an in-house battery recycling plant in Kuppenheim, Germany. Of course, digital and connected features are becoming crucial to the user experience, and Nvidia, Qualcomm, and LG Electronics are racing to develop the computing power for faster processing and seamless service. But for now, keep your eyes peeled on the road for Waymo, which tops our list this year, as it rolls out commercial robotaxi service around the U.S. and possibly in a city near you. 1. WaymoFor making robotaxis part of the streetscape After 15 years, the original Google moonshot looks like it’s finally starting to reach escape velocity. Launched in 2009 as Google’s self-driving car unit, Waymo had its share of false starts before it began offering a limited version of its driverless ride-sharing service to customers in Phoenix in 2020. But in recent months, Waymo has emerged as the company ushering robotaxis out of the sci-fi realm and into reality. It’s paving the way for autonomous vehicles in five major U.S. cities, setting the bar for safety, transparency, and regulation for all other competitors, especially Tesla. And it’s making the general public comfortable with what now seems will be an inevitable part of the urban landscape. With wide-scale operations in San Francisco and Phoenix (and a limited rollout in Los Angeles), Waymo has been growing quickly—even with its emphasis on scaling responsibly. It is partnering with Uber and rolled out service in Austin in March, with plans to launch in Atlanta. Waymo also unveiled its Generation 6 automated driving system, an enhanced-technology suite designed handle tougher weather conditions. In October, the Waymo One taxi fleet reached 1 million autonomous miles driven. Waymo has made real what seemed unimaginable 15 years. It’s proven that Alphabet’s moonshot strategy can work. Read more about Waymo, honored as No. 1 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025. 2. BYDFor making EVs that are ultra-affordable, ultrafast, and even amphibious After almost 30 years as a battery supplier to mobile phone manufacturers, BYD has found explosive growth as an EV maker, catapulting over competitors to become a global juggernaut. The Warren Buffett-backed Chinese company shifted to building cars nearly two decades ago, applying its expertise in producing lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries to develop reliable, sub-$35,000 EVs. But the mid-2023 launch of BYD’s most affordable model—the four-figure Seagull compact car—ignited BYD’s exponential sales run. Boasting an all-electric range up to 252 miles, the Seagull became China’s top seller in August 2024 and solidified BYD’s status as the country’s largest automaker. But BYD isn’t focused only on affordability. Shipments of its first supercar, the $238,000 Yangwang U9, began in February. Today, BYD is running neck and neck with Tesla for the top spot among global EV makers and it is the undisputed champion of the plug-in hybrid sector, with 40% of that market. Last year, BYD delivered more than 3.8 million passenger vehicles in 2024—surpassing its full-year target of 3.6 million. The year also saw the company’s rapid expansion across Asia and into Mexico, South America, Europe, and Australia. In November, BYD produced its 10 millionth battery-powered vehicle, becoming the first automaker to reach that milestone, and announced a new Blade EV battery to power its future long-range EVs. The next-generation Blade technology is expected to increase driving range as well as battery life cycle. Whether BYD brings its cars to the U.S. is a question of geopolitics, but at least one top analyst says social media has helped spread the word among Gen Z and millennial shoppers, who are open to buying Chinese vehicles. “It’s only a matter of time before BYD is selling retail passenger vehicles in the U.S. market,” says Ed Kim, chief analyst at AutoPacific. “American consumers want them, and awareness of them is strong.” Read more about BYD, honored as No. 5 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025. 3. UL SolutionsFor developing cutting-edge automotive battery and energy storage testing EV batteries can catch fire or explode in the event of a collision, mechanical failure, or weather catastrophe, making battery safety crucial as more electric vehicles hit the road. Northbrook, Illinois-based safety science company UL Solutions has emerged as a key player in the space, conducting rigorous tests to determine how EV batteries handle a host of hazards, from thermal runaway to electric shock. The company launched an initial public offering in April 2024 at a roughly $7 billion valuation, and four months later, it opened a 90,000-square-foot advanced battery lab in Auburn Hills, Michigan. The company’s largest-ever laboratory investment puts performance and safety testing under one roof. The state-of-the-art lab is one of the most extensive electric and hybrid vehicle and industrial battery testing laboratories in the U.S., conducting electrical, mechanical, and environmental testing against standards and goals set by the International Electrotechnical Commission, United Nations, Society of Automotive Engineers, and others. The company grew revenue 7.2% to $2.9 billion in 2024, thanks to business from customers in more than 110 countries. It plans to construct a new Advanced Automotive and Battery Testing Center in South Korea to serve more customers across the Asia Pacific region and to add EV charger testing. 4. NvidiaFor powering the autonomous vehicle revolution Nvidia dominates the market for the semiconductors that power AI platforms in automotive and a range of other industries. Its GPUs are well-suited to the demands of AI model training, making Nvidia’s technology crucial to the creation and widespread adoption of self-driving cars. Top automakers from around the world (including BYD, Mercedes-Benz, Rivian, and Volvo) utilize the latest technologies from Nvidia (Drive AGX, Drive Orin, Drive Thor) to power their autonomous driving systems, and in early January 2024, Nvidia secured its pole position in the race to build better autonomous driving systems when it announced at CES that the world’s largest car manufacturer, Toyota, would be deploying its technology to build its next-generation vehicles. All this has put Nvidia on a tear, with revenue and market cap surging. In November, Nvidia replaced Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. 5. Mercedes-BenzFor advancing battery chemistry and developing a recycling economy Mercedes-Benz is pulling ahead in the race to build a sophisticated battery economy. In October 2024, the automaker opened a state-of-the-art battery recycling factory in Kuppenheim, Germany. The factory—Europe’s first to house an integrated mechanical-hydrometallurgical process within a single plant—makes Mercedes the first automaker to close the ponderous battery recycling loop with its own in-house facility. Mercedes says the factory’s integrated process boasts a recovery rate of more than 96%, enabling a true circular economy of battery materials from old cars. The batteries come from test vehicles and production ramp-ups, as well as from returned vehicles from Mercedes-Benz. The plant will play a significant role in the battery life cycle, from shredding of battery modules to processing active battery materials to recovering scarce raw materials such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. The downstream hydro-metallurgical process handles the “black mass,” the active materials that make up the electrodes of the battery cells. The factory, which began production in October 2024, is expected to generate enough material to produce more than 50,000 new battery modules annually. The knowledge gleaned from the project could help scale up production volumes in the medium- to long-term. Meanwhile, the automaker continues to roll out new EVs. In April, Mercedes-Benz launched an electric version of its rough-and-tumble G-Wagen truck, showing that electrification is possible for virtually any vehicle. 6. RivianFor disrupting the EV industry with ultraefficient battery packs It’s tough to start a car company. Just ask any of the fledgling EV companies that folded last year. The road has been rocky for Rivian, but the startup EV maker proved its staying power in June with the introduction of the second-generation R1S utility vehicle and R1T pickup truck. Together, the vehicles are challenging Tesla, General Motors, and other automakers thanks to their hearty, long-range power trains that are designed, engineered, and manufactured in-house. The second-generation battery packs offer up to 420 miles of range, while a new lithium iron phosphate-based battery pack can achieve an EPA-estimated 270 miles. Despite challenging sales, supply shortages, and layoffs, the company continues to plow ahead as a leader in the battery-electric sphere. In March, Rivian introduced a new midsize platform for smaller and more affordable vehicles, and followed that with the opening of its Rivian Adventure Network of DC fast chargers to all EVs. In October, the company announced that Volkswagen will invest $5.8 billion as part of a joint venture focused on developing vehicle software. In November, Rivian secured a $6.6 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy to revive its plans to build an EV factory in Stanton Springs, Georgia. 7. LG Vehicle SolutionFor bringing entertainment into the car LG is leading the lucrative race to bring entertainment into the car. In 2024, the South Korean juggernaut showed that it can adapt its expertise in consumer electronics for in-vehicle use, tailoring its user-friendly entertainment technology for automotive customers including Hyundai and Kia. In May, LG debuted a new infotainment platform with the launch of the Kia EV3 compact utility vehicle. The system brings LG Channels, an expansive network of entertainment, news and other content, into the car, eliminating complex app-based logins. The following month, the company rolled out its AlphaWare suite of customizable software to help automakers integrate advanced software and connectivity features across their lineups as seamlessly as possible. The comprehensive system addresses five key areas powering the vehicle, such as PlayWare for infotainment and VisionWare for safety. In November, LG presented its vision for the future of automotive interiors: a Digital Cockpit gamma featuring a 12.3-inch transparent OLED screen displaying real-time navigation, current speed, and points of interest, as well as a 14.2-inch retractable plastic OLED display embedded in the center console. A handy AI-based virtual assistant can detect driver fatigue, order a coffee from a shop nearby, and help you pay for the transaction through the screen’s built-in fingerprint-recognition sensor. 8. QualcommFor creating a scalable cloud-based platform for the automotive industry Qualcomm is expanding beyond mobile phones, transferring its expertise in chip technology to the automotive industry as cars become a new computing space. The system-on-chip technology that Qualcomm has honed for mobile phones is becoming crucial for the automotive industry as it evolves toward centralized computing. In October, the chipmaker announced a significant advance in automotive semiconductor technology with the launch of a scalable platform based on its fastest CPU. Qualcomm’s ultrafast Oryon CPU will power the latest version of its Snapdragon Digital Chassis, comprised of Snapdragon Cockpit Elite, which supports in-vehicle experiences like entertainment, and Snapdragon Ride Elite, which provides automated driving capabilities. The Snapdragon Digital Chassis can handle parallel AI workloads, such as processing data from multiple sensors and cameras to prevent a collision. It also allows different systems—such as infotainment and safety systems—to operate independently, which enables the car to process different types of data faster to make better-informed decisions. The cloud-connected platforms give customers like General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Rivian, BMW, Ford, Honda, and Hyundai the flexibility to develop features such as customizable dashboards and over-the-air updates after the car has been purchased. In February, Qualcomm reported robust Q1 2025 growth, with automative bringing in $961 million, representing 61% year-over-year growth. 9. MichelinFor creating sustainable tires to support next-gen EVs Tires, perhaps the last part of a car to modernize, are finally undergoing a paradigm shift. Since 1960, cars have grown larger and heavier—increasing 21% in height, 14% in width, and 3% in length—putting more pressure on the tire, the humble component that supports the entire car. Now EVs, with their heavy batteries, are increasing weight by roughly 20%, an industrywide shift that necessitates more durable and more sustainable tires to support the extra heft. “Everything on electrification is pushing the market for bigger tires,” says Bruno de Feraudy, Michelin’s senior vice president of original equipment. Michelin’s Pilot Sport EV tires have been on the market since 2021, and at the 2024 Le Mans race in June, the company demonstrated a sustainable, track-oriented tire for the all-electric Porsche Cayman GT4 ePerformance race car. The motorsports tire at Le Mans is composed of 71% sustainable renewable and recycled raw materials, while the average tire uses 200 components that are difficult to recycle. These sustainable tires make greater use of rubber, recycled carbon black, oils such as sunflower oil and bio-sourced resins, silica from rice husks, and recycled steel. 10. Formula 1For pioneering the hybrid technology powering passenger cars Formula 1 has shot to the cultural forefront with the Netflix documentary Drive to Survive, now in its seventh season, but it’s also the world’s foremost test bed for the hybrid technology that trickles down into passenger cars. In June 2024, its governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), announced the racing series’s most ambitious plans for going carbon neutral. The regulations, which go into effect in 2026, call for each team to build a power unit that derives half its power from a V6 turbo engine and half from its battery and electric motor. FIA’s ever-changing regulations breed innovation by requiring teams to continually reengineer their cars and push technology to the limit. Each car competing in Formula 1, arguably the world’s most technically advanced sport, features thousands of sensors taking more than 1 million data points per second to optimize performance as the driver hurls the car up to 225 miles per hour. The sport has more eyes on it than ever, gaining momentum stateside with the recent addition of Grand Prix in Miami and Las Vegas. Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more. View the full article

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

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

Podcasts have an undeniable allure for both their creators and fans. They hit all the right points – accessibility, depth, and variety – and have cemented their top content format status. As of 2024, over 5 million podcasts and 70 million episodes are available worldwide. With that many podcasts, you can be sure there’s a podcast for everyone. Whether you want a humorous retelling of a 20-something’s first time reading the Harry Potter series or your news fed directly to your ears, you likely have something you return to periodically. We selected the podcasts on this list so that whether you’re looking for advice to grow as a content creator or for the latest marketing news, you’ll likely find something that resonates enough for you to consistently return to and feast your ears. Podcasts for the social enthusiast, aspiring or professionalSoulcial ScoopIf you are an entrepreneur keen to manage your business sustainably and successfully, then Soulcial Scoop by Kristen Bousquet is for you. This weekly podcast is designed to assist entrepreneurial influencers in managing their businesses with sustainability and success. Each Tuesday, listeners can expect a mix of the latest social media news and engaging discussions with industry leaders to provide inspiration and practical advice. Listen to it here Dot SocialIf you’re a social media enthusiast at any level, tune into the Dot Social podcast hosted by Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard. This podcast features conversations with thinkers and innovators shaping the social media landscape. Explore the evolving digital world through insightful discussions on trends, impacts, and the next big things in social media directly from industry leaders. Listen to it here Ahead of the Curve with Coco MocoeFor trend-seekers, Ahead of the Curve is the podcast of choice. Hosted by seasoned marketing expert Coco Mocoe, each episode explores the latest in marketing, pop culture, and internet trends. With a rich entertainment and digital media background, Coco offers invaluable insights and tips through engaging discussions. Listen to it here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Buffer Chat: The PodcastForgive me for including our own show in this list — but we're super proud of Buffer Chat, and we have some exciting guests lined up in 2025! The gist of the show is that social media growth looks different for everyone — and there are many routes you can take to get there. To help, we speak to successful creators, marketers, and business owners about their journeys to social success. We've even had insiders from the platforms themselves come on as guests! Listen to it here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Podcasts for the content creatorCreator ScienceIf you want to level up as a content creator, look no further than Jay Clouse’s, Creator Science podcast, which dives deep into strategies and tactics content creators use to succeed today. Focusing on what works in the present rather than what was effective in the past, each episode uncovers specific, actionable insights for creators. As a Signal Award-winning show and part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, Creator Science is a must-listen for anyone looking to grow as a creator. Listen to it here The Colin and Samir ShowThe Colin and Samir Show is a podcast that dives deep into the creator economy, offering insightful conversations with top creators, entrepreneurs, and industry insiders. Hosted by Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, the show unpacks the strategies, stories, and trends shaping the world of online content, making it a must-listen for anyone looking to grow as a creator or understand the business behind digital media. Listen: Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify Creator UploadIf you want to immerse yourself in the creator economy, check out Creator Upload, hosted by Lauren Schnipper, VP of Corporate Development at Jellysmack, and Josh Cohen, co-founder of Tubefilter. Each week, you’ll get the latest insights on social media trends, platform updates, and influencer news. Listen to it here Creators on AirLearn from fellow creators through Creators on Air, hosted by Akta Vibes for Passionfroot. If you’ve been feeling a little lonely, this podcast will help you feel accompanied and understood. The show features candid conversations with top creators, answering poignant questions about their processes. It's a space for sharing wins, challenges, and insights, fostering a supportive community. Listen to it here The Creator Project by Jade BeasonFor creators looking to monetize their content in 2025, the Creator Project by Jade Beason is the perfect podcast. Each week, Jade shares inspiring stories from diverse creators, from their income strategies to their social media growth hacks. Listen to it here The Great Creators with Guy RazOne of the highest-rated podcasts on this list, The Great Creators with Guy Raz delves into the creative processes of some of the world’s most celebrated performers and creators. Uncover the journey, struggles, and breakthrough moments behind top creators’ iconic works. This podcast offers listeners a deep dive into the minds of their favorite entertainers, providing both inspiration and insight into creativity. Listen to it here Creator Club by Katie StecklyFor the most practical advice on building a solid Instagram strategy, check out the Creator Club Podcast, hosted by Katie Steckly. It’s a treasure trove of insights for content creators looking to elevate their social media game. From growing a six-figure content business to making impactful mindset shifts for 2025, Katie's podcast is an essential resource for creators seeking to innovate and succeed in the digital space. Listen to it here Creators are BrandsIf you want to elevate beyond “just” content creator status, Creators Are Brands is a podcast hosted by Tom Boyd that offers actionable insights on how creators can build their brands online. The podcast features interviews with creators, their teams, and solo shows, covering mindsets, tactics, and the business side of content creation. It's a must-listen for anyone in the creator economy looking to learn successful strategies. Listen to it here The Business of ContentGet into the nitty-gritty of how publishers create, distribute, and monetize digital content through The Business of Content, hosted by Simon Owens. Through insightful discussions with industry professionals, the show sheds light on the evolving digital media landscape, offering valuable lessons for content creators and marketers alike. Listen to it here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Creator SpotlightThe Creator Spotlight Podcast offers in-depth weekly conversations with notable creators, exploring their strategies for audience growth, monetization, and content production. Hosted by Francis Zierer, each episode provides valuable insights into the creator economy, making it an essential listen for aspiring and established creators alike. New episodes are released every Thursday. Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube Billion Dollar CreatorWherever you’re at in your content monetization journey, Billion Dollar Creator probably has an episode to inspire you. Hosted by Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit, and Rachel Rodgers, founder of Hello Seven, this is a podcast focused on teaching creators how to leverage their attention into significant wealth. Through discussions with experts and analysis of successes and failures, the podcast aims to show creators how to build and scale their audiences to achieve massive business success. It's a guide for any creator looking to turn their passion into a billion-dollar enterprise. Listen to it here Podcasts for the knowledge seekerTastelandTasteland is a podcast offering creative takes on media, marketing, and technology. Hosted by Daisy Alioto, CEO of Dirt Media, and Francis Zierer, editor of Creator Spotlight, the show features insightful discussions with industry experts, exploring emerging trends and cultural phenomena. With new episodes every Wednesday, Tasteland is a must-listen for those interested in the intersections of media, technology, and culture. Listen to it here NudgeNudge is a podcast that simplifies behavioral science, offering concise, insightful episodes filled with real-world examples to apply to your daily life. Hosted by Phill Agnew, it's fast-paced yet insightful, packing an “MBA's worth of insight” into every show, making it an essential listen for anyone interested in the practical applications of behavioral science in marketing and beyond. Listen to it here Unthinkable with Jay AcunzoIf you’ve ever spotted a creator strategy that made you rethink your whole process, this is the podcast for you. Unthinkable with Jay Acunzo offers a unique perspective on the unconventional choices made by quality-obsessed creators. The podcast features stories of creators and the remarkable projects they've developed by following their intuition over conventional wisdom. It celebrates creativity and originality in an era dominated by AI and standardized content. Listen to it here The School of GreatnessFor a diverse look at what it takes to become successful in any field, check out The School of Greatness. Hosted by Lewis Howes, this is a top-ranked Business and Self-Development podcast featuring interviews with world-class experts in entrepreneurship, health, mindset, and relationships. Launched in January 2013, it has garnered over 150 million downloads, diverse content, and unique interviews aimed at inspiring greatness. Listen to it here Deep Dive with Ali AbdaalWith Deep Dive, Ali Abdaal explores the strategies, philosophies, and tools that contribute to a happier, healthier, and more productive life. The podcast features interviews with entrepreneurs, creators, and other inspiring figures and offers actionable insights into personal and professional growth. It's a great resource for anyone looking to enhance their productivity and well-being. Listen to it here Podcasts for the business-orientedMorning Brew DailyThe Morning Brew Daily podcast is a concise and engaging source for the latest business and economic news. With an average episode length of 25 minutes, the podcast efficiently covers essential news and current events, making it an ideal choice for listeners looking to stay informed at the start of their day. Listen to it here Shopify MastersFor creators and small business owners looking for diverse ways to grow and monetize, the Shopify Masters podcast provides tons of actionable advice. Each week, the show features interviews with successful online store owners and industry experts who share their experiences and strategies. It's an invaluable resource for anyone looking to start or grow their own business, offering insights into creating social media ads, optimizing websites, and more. Listen to it here My First MillionFor every idea, there’s potential for a business and that’s what multi-time entrepreneurs Shaan Puri and Sam Parr showcase through My First Million. Each week, the hosts brainstorm new business ideas, featuring expert interviews, case studies, and personal insights to explore avenues for entrepreneurship. The podcast is valuable for entrepreneurs seeking practical advice on starting and scaling successful ventures. Listen to it here Busy Blooming with Tess BarclayWhether you’re trying to build a career, business, or side hustle, Busy Blooming is full of guides, tips and strategies. Hosted by Tess Barclay, the podcast delivers insights from her experience in influencer marketing and branding. The podcast empowers listeners to be authentic and offers advice on confidence, strategy, and more in weekly episodes. Listen to it here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Where It HappensExpand your idea of what’s possible through Where It Happens, a business podcast hosted by Greg Isenberg. Each episode explores how to build products people love and find the best business ideas. Subscribe to Greg Isenberg's newsletter and follow on social media for updates. Listen to it here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Podcasts for the busy marketerContent, BrieflyFor content teams of all shapes and sizes, there’s no better podcast than Content, Briefly by Superpath. This is a B2B content strategy podcast featuring SaaS companies' insights on strategy, operations, and team structure. It offers valuable lessons from episodes like WorkRamp's playbook and Sumo Logic's curiosity space. A must-listen for content marketers looking to improve their practices. Listen to it here The Anonymous MarketerIf you want your burning marketing questions answered, The Anonymous Marketer is for you. Hosted by our very own Kirsti Lang, this podcast addresses the unspoken questions of the B2B marketing community, with each episode stemming from anonymous queries. It features in-depth conversations with marketing experts on topics ranging from building marketing portfolios to navigating personal branding within corporate environments. This podcast provides a platform for discussing the real challenges and strategies in B2B marketing. Listen to it here This Old MarketingGet the latest in content marketing, media, and digital content through weekly episodes of This Old Marketing, hosted by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. Known for its educational and entertaining discussions, it is a go-to source for marketing professionals seeking insights into industry trends. Listen to it here Supercharge MarketingGet into no-nonsense conversations with B2B marketing professionals who embrace unconventional approaches with the Supercharge Marketing podcast hosted by Pius Chan, VP of Growth at Lumen5. This is a go-to resource for B2B marketers focusing on brand and storytelling. Supercharge Marketing provides listeners with inspiration and actionable strategies to enhance their marketing efforts. Listen to it here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Which podcasts are your favorites?I hope I’ve hit on a few of your favorites in the list here and given you some good ideas on possible new ones to grab! Which podcasts do you follow? Which are repeat listens? Which ones have you found most insightful? 💡Once you’ve listened to all of these, we also have several top newsletters to subscribe to – check them out here.View the full article

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

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

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

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

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

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Her voice cracking with emotion as she stood under the fluorescent lights, Janice Blanock asked her local legislators in southwestern Pennsylvania to take a moment and leaf through the photos of her son that she’d handed them. “There’s really nothing different that I can say to you that I haven’t said already over the last several months,” she told supervisors for the tiny township of Cecil outside Pittsburgh. “I can, however, share these photographs. These are just a few of the many pictures we have of our son Luke, from the time he became ill until before he died.” The supervisors were gathered to vote on a zoning ordinance amendment that would greatly increase the required buffer zone between oil and gas drilling operations and homes and schools. The proposed rule mandating a setback of 2,500 feet—five times the distance of the current law—had originally been proposed as a statewide requirement by Governor Josh Shapiro when he was Pennsylvania’s attorney general. A bill based on that recommendation later stalled out when introduced in the state House of Representatives. Blanock, a 30-year resident of Cecil, had a reason to take the issue seriously. Her son waged a three-year battle with a rare type of bone cancer known as Ewing’s sarcoma and died in 2016 at age 19. Many believe, though there’s yet to be demonstrable proof, that his cancer could be tied to oil and gas drilling’s many carcinogenic pollutants, some that are radioactive. In 2019, a cluster of Ewing’s sarcoma cases was identified in Washington County, where Cecil is located. Cecil’s school district was hit particularly hard. The county is home to more than 2,000 natural gas wells and was the 2004 birthplace of the state’s fracking industry. (Fracking is a process in which sand, water, and chemicals are blasted into the earth to free fossil fuel.) A growing body of peer-reviewed research has linked living near natural gas drilling operations to cancers and respiratory, reproductive, and neurological damage. In 2023, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the state Department of Health linked fracking exposure in the region encompassing Cecil to increased risk of asthma and lymphoma. “Will you look at the damn picture, Darlene,” Blanock urged one supervisor after handing her a photo of Luke. Around an hour later, the zoning ordinance passed and the room erupted with applause. With that, Cecil—a town of just 15,000 residents and no outsize political power—became the first jurisdiction in Pennsylvania to adopt such a restrictive measure, even as similar efforts at the state level have failed. But already it is facing legal challenges from two natural gas companies active in the area—Texas-based fracking company Range Resources, and Colorado-based gas pipeline company MarkWest Liberty Midstream. The Cecil Township Board of Supervisors meets monthly at the town’s Municipal Building. [Photo: Audrey Carleton] Under current requirements, natural gas wells in Pennsylvania must be at least 500 feet from buildings and water wells, which environmentalists and medical experts say is not far enough. In 2023, a bill that would have required all new natural gas wells in the state to be located at least 2,500 feet—nearly half a mile—from buildings and water wells was slated for a committee vote, but was abruptly killed at the request of Democratic leadership in the state House of Representatives. Three years before that, then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro released a grand jury report calling for a statewide 2,500-foot buffer between human activity and natural gas production. “There is one point that is impossible to deny,” the grand jury report stated. “The closer people happen to live to a massive, industrial drilling complex, the worse it is likely to be for them.” While that plea failed to get political traction, environmental groups continue to urge action. For their part, natural gas industry groups have minimized concerns about health risks associated with fracking exposure and have resisted proposals for setbacks or no-drill zones. But despite industry efforts, Cecil has gone its own way. The township’s updated oil and gas ordinance prohibits new oil and gas wells from being drilled within 2,500 feet of “protected structures,” which includes homes, businesses, and religious institutions, and within 5,000 feet of schools and hospitals. Though the ordinance does not call for an outright ban on new drilling, Range Resources contends it would limit fracking in Cecil in such a way that it violates state law. The township argues otherwise: Wells located outside Cecil can still be drilled under the town. The ordinance also imposes additional restrictions on the industry that have generated less debate: It prohibits retention ponds for water used in the fracking process, places new noise restrictions on drilling, and limits work hours on well pads. “I was not sure for the longest time that this was going to go this way,” said Sarah Martik, a Cecil resident and executive director of the Center for Coalfield Justice, a southwestern Pennsylvania-based nonprofit environmental justice organization. “This one thing is as far as we’ve ever gone, as far as regulating this industry in a way that is protective of our communities.” But the road to this outcome was fraught. Documents obtained by Capital & Main through right-to-know requests reveal an up-close look at life in the shale fields, with citizens largely fed up with living alongside the natural gas industry. Noise, bright lights, and shaking at all hours were among the complaints emailed to supervisors in the months ahead of the vote. “Here I am once again trying to prepare for another sleepless night,” one resident wrote to the supervisors in May. “My whole house shakes, my children are disturbed from sleep, my pets are afraid to be out in the yard—can you please help us.” “I have SUFFERED from vertigo for years,” another resident wrote in June, referring to vibrations from drilling at a nearby well pad that she felt in her home. “You know in some places they torture people with this kind of low res hum and vibration. Torture—because that is what it is.” Documents also offer a look at the playbook the industry followed to curry favor among Cecil residents. Over the five years before the ordinance was adopted in 2024, Range Resources, the township’s only active natural gas well operator with 34 active wells per state records, donated nearly to $300,000 to the community. The money was disbursed throughout the township, the encompassing school district, and local volunteer first responder organizations, and it was spent on festivals, children’s sports teams, a science fair, and CPR training sessions, according to a spreadsheet obtained by Capital & Main through a right-to-know request. Range Resources did not immediately respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment. At least one township supervisor has financial ties to Range Resources. Records show Supervisor Darlene Barni has, for many years, maintained an oil and gas lease with the company; she ultimately recused herself from the final ordinance vote but participated in earlier stages of its development and routinely shares pro-oil and gas posts on Facebook. The company also weighed in at multiple stages during the drafting of the ordinance, using experts to testify against existing science that ties fracking to poor environmental and health outcomes and urging town leaders to refrain from enacting a setback as large as 2,500 feet. “At least 92% of Cecil Township’s surface property would be excluded from future oil and gas development,” an attorney for Range Resources told supervisors in a letter. This would have the effect of limiting residents’ oil and gas royalty payments, he wrote. The attorney said the setbacks were “exceedingly restrictive and inconsistent.” Though the company currently has no permits under consideration for new well pads, Range Resources is challenging the ordinance with the township’s Zoning Hearing Board. This process could take months, and the challenge is opposed by the township, residents, and several local environmental groups. At issue is whether Cecil’s ordinance is legal. “It’s a very, very specific question,” said Kara Shirdon, who chairs the Cecil Zoning Hearing Board but recused herself for Range Resources’ legal challenge to eliminate the appearance of bias (Shirdon has been publicly supportive of the setback ordinance.) Though she said she’s confident the ordinance will survive, she believes it will strain the township’s resources. “I think, honestly, the whole entire thing is because they’re pissed and they want to drain as much money as possible out of the township as punishment for not letting them do what they want to do.” * * * Michelle Stonemark moved to Cecil township in 2012 after her parents bought around 30 acres there with the intent of housing their children and grandchildren. Her parents, sister, and family friends all built homes next to one another, in succession. “And then it was my turn,” Stonemark told Capital & Main. “Just as I had gotten the drawing . . . we find out that Range Resources had applied to put a well pad in right behind my new house.” With around 30 days’ notice, she recalled, Stonemark and her family found legal help and learned “everything we could about fracking,” in order to oppose the project. But their effort failed. “We didn’t have enough time. We were starting from nothing,” she said. Drilling at the pad began in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown, as Stonemark, her husband and three children were stuck at home. Today, the well pad, known as Augustine George, sits just over 500 feet from her home, she said, and routinely rattles the walls and windows and sends fumes into the air. She said she and members of her family often experience headaches, nausea, nosebleeds, and earaches. They can feel vibrations from the well pad in their chests, she said. “Flaring would go off at any and all times, during the day, at night,” she said. Flaring, which involves burning off excess methane, has been linked to asthma and other respiratory conditions. In response, Stonemark launched a Facebook page she uses to serve as an industry watchdog: She posts photos, videos, and documents relevant to the oil and gas industry’s indiscretions, and publicly mourns the future she once envisioned for herself in Cecil. “As I stand outside on this beautiful morning I cannot enjoy the day,” she wrote in one post in May. “A foul odor lingers in the air, and the constant low noises pulsate through my ears and head.” Stonemark and her husband are also now attempting to intervene legally and become a formal party against Range Resources’ challenge to the setback ordinance. Shirdon said she first caught wind of Range Resources’ plans for a well pad in 2017, less than a year after moving into her home. Since then, she said she’s experienced headaches, sinus and respiratory issues, difficulty concentrating and sleeping, and irritability. “The part that people underestimate, I think, is how much anxiety it causes,” Shirdon said. “Every time you feel the rumble, or every time you get stopped on the road, you start to worry, ‘Are my kids being adversely affected by what’s going on here?’” Merle Lesko has lived in his house nearby for nearly 30 years. Lesko said he and Stonemark often jokingly spar over who lives closer to the Augustine George pad. Salmon pink sound walls, dozens of feet high, poke through a line of trees behind his property. Lesko first urged the township to adopt a new buffer ordinance in early 2024, after regularly recording the decibel level emitted by the Augustine George pad at different locations in his house. He moved his bed and the desk where he works based on the lowest noise reading he found in his residence—his basement—just to escape the vibrations that would rattle his house. “The noise was so bad, you could hear or feel the noise over a running lawnmower,” he said. “They’ve taken so many summers from me.” Though it took months of often impassioned debate, the adoption of Cecil’s ordinance has added fuel to a fight at the state level, where climate justice organizations are urging environmental regulators to increase the statewide oil and setback of 500 feet. In October, the Protective Buffers Pennsylvania campaign filed a petition with the state’s Environmental Quality Board, pushing for the adoption of an executive rule that would require a 3,281-foot buffer between fracking wells and buildings and water wells—a setback nearly 1,000 feet wider than in Cecil’s ordinance. “There should be a baseline floor of protection for everybody in the commonwealth,” said Lisa Hallowell, senior attorney at the Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental nonprofit that helped author the petition. More than 10% of Pennsylvanians lived within a half mile of an active oil and gas well as of 2022, the petition notes. Many share medical symptoms—rashes, cancers, sleep disorders—and have seen their water supplies affected by fracking, the petition states. Protective Buffers Pennsylvania has been involved in previous attempts to pass tougher statewide setback rules, including the 2023 bill that died in committee, Hallowell said. These efforts never got far. “The Legislature has not had an appetite for that,” she noted. Indeed, around the time that the 2023 setback bill was circulating through the Legislature, state Senator Gene Yaw of Williamsport, Republican chair of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, questioned the need for the measure at all, saying in a public hearing that he had “not heard” of any links between fracking and cardiovascular, reproductive, or nervous system damage. Yaw has, separately, disclosed personal income from oil and gas companies EQT and Equinor, and won his reelection to the senate in November after accepting thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry. A group of Democratic senators has announced that they soon plan to reintroduce the 2,500-foot setback proposal. But that bill will face an uphill battle in a divided Legislature. Janice Blanock at home [Photo: Audrey Carleton] After helping cement the setback proposal as law in Cecil, Blanock now wants to see other communities protected. “We’re hoping this movement goes far and wide,” Blanock said the day after the ordinance passed. “I think, just the fact that that happened last night, people will learn about it [and think], If they can do it, why can’t we?” Several months later, as legal challenges threaten Cecil’s hard-won victory, Blanock remains resolute. She still chokes back tears when she talks about Luke, and still resents having had her concerns about health risks associated with fracking exposure denied by the industry. “It’s not just about Luke,” she said. “This is about my other children, my grandchildren, my community, my family, friends, neighbors.” Blanock shares photos and mementos of her son Luke. [Photo: Audrey Carleton] “They can appeal it,” she said of the natural gas companies challenging the ordinance. “And then we can appeal it. We’re as strong in our resolve to win this as they are.” This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues. View the full article

Have you ever finished off your last pickle spear and, craving a little more of that vinegary punch, taken a couple of sips of brine straight from the jar? Or maybe you’re more open about your pickle juice habits and like to mix up a pickle martini in the light of day, rather than hunched over your fridge light at 2 a.m. Whatever you prefer, now there’s a product designed for exactly those kinds of moments. Claussen, the Chicago-based pickle purveyor, has picked up on the TikTok trend of using pickle brine as a mixer for everything from Diet Coke to “pickle cereal,” and they’re meeting customers where they’re at with a new drink called Just the Brine. As the name suggests, Just the Brine is an eight-ounce bottle of juice-sans-pickle. The limited-edition product comes in a six-pack, and it debuted for a short time on GoPuff over the weekend in honor of St. Patrick’s Day (for those who missed out, it’s now available to win on Claussen’s website while supplies last.) Just the Brine is the latest evolution of a pickle craze that started back in 2022 (remember Sonic’s pickle slushie?) and has shown a shockingly strong staying power in the cultural zeitgeist. [Photo: Claussen] Care for some pickles with that brine? Since 2022, we’ve gone from pickle pizza and potato chips to Grillo’s pickle toothpaste—and, judging by TikTok’s ongoing pickle obsession, it seems like the trend has yet to run its course. Users are finding ways to use the preserved vegetables that even the most ardent pickle fans never could’ve imagined, like a pickle fountain or a fried pickle board. The next evolution of the trend, it seems, is to just lose the pickles altogether. “Last October, Dua Lipa’s viral TikTok video mixing Diet Coke with pickle juice sparked a cultural moment, amassing over 12 million views,” says Caroline Sheehey, Claussen’s brand manager. “Inspired by her mixture, Claussen responded by seeding a product concept, Just The Brine, on Instagram. The post received nearly 70,000 likes and thousands of comments from fans sharing how they already love Claussen’s beloved brine and use it in a variety of ways such as after a sports workout, as a brine for their chicken, to help with dehydration as a morning after cure, cocktail mixer, and more.” After seeing the fan response, Sheehy says, the team knew they had to make Just the Brine a reality. Claussen is marketing its brine bottles as a kind of dual-purpose product: a mixer to pregame your night out, and an electrolyte beverage for your inevitable hangover the next day. One serving size is two ounces, which contains 630 mg of sodium (about half the sodium content of a standard instant ramen pack.) “[Just the Brine] is perfect for ‘pickling’ at night and using as a mixer in your cocktails or soda, and perfect for ‘unpickling’ the next morning as a refreshing electrolyte boost,” Sheehy says. It’s a strange marketing tactic, given that curing your pickle-induced hangover with more pickles seems like the quickest way to never want to set eyes on the color green again. But, let’s be honest, the chances that Claussen ever actually adds this stunt product to its permanent line-up are slim to none—so the lucky few who get their hands on it might as well enjoy it via a pickle-fueled rager while it lasts. View the full article

When I first started traveling, my dad used to ask what I’m running away from with my travels. Another time, a commenter told me to stop running away from my problems and to start living life. “Grow up,” he said. And, years ago, there was even a blog called “Mom says I’m running away.” I’m not sure why, but there is this perception out there that anyone who travels long term and isn’t interested in settling down or getting a conventional job must be running away from something. We travelers are running away from responsibility, being a grown-up, heartache, problems, etc, etc. We are all just Peter Pans refusing to be “adults.” While American society thinks traveling is something everyone should do at one point, it’s only gap years after college or short vacations that seem to be acceptable. Get it out of your system and come back into The Matrix. Those of us who lead nomadic lifestyles, or who linger just a bit too long somewhere before reaching that final homestretch, are all too often accused of running away. Yes, go travel — but not for too long, the world says. Responsible people don’t just travel forever. We nomads must have awful, miserable lives, or are weird, or have had something traumatic happen to us that we are trying to escape. People assume that we are simply running away from our problems, running away from “the real world.” And to all those people who think I am running away, I say: you are right. I am running away. I’m running away from your idea of the “real” world. I’m avoiding your life. I’m running towards everything — towards the world, exotic places, new people, different cultures, and my own idea of freedom. I’m building a life that makes me happy. While there may be exceptions (as there are with everything), most people who become nomads do so because they want to experience the world, not escape their problems. They are running away from office life, commutes, and weekend errands, and the corporate 9 to 5. They are running away from the strict path society has laid out as “normal.” The one that makes us mindless ants marching to and fro. We (I) want to experience every culture, see every mountain, eat different food, attend crazy festivals, meet new people, and enjoy different holidays around the world. We want to construct a life that makes us happy on our own terms. Life is short and we only get to live it once. I want to look back and say I did exciting things and lived life on my own terms, not say I spent my life reading blogs like this during my lunch break while wishing I was doing the same thing. No one dies saying, “If only I had spent more time in the office!” As an American, my perspective might be different. In my country, the accepted path is long and narrow: you go to college, get a job, get married, buy a house, have 2.5 children, raise them, and then retire. Only then, after you’ve put in your time, can you enjoy the fruits of your labor. Society boxes you in and restricts your movements to their expectations. And any deviation is considered abnormal and weird. People may want to travel, tell you they envy what you do, and say they wish they could do the same thing. But they never do. Few people muster the courage to take the leap, no matter how much their heart pulls them. They are simply fascinated by a lifestyle so outside the norm. While social media, the rise of digital nomading, and websites like this have made quitting your job to travel the world or teach English in Thailand a little more acceptable, the general attitude is still “follow the path if you want to be normal.” Well, I don’t want to be normal. I feel like the reason why people tell us we are running away is that they can’t fathom the fact that we broke the mold and are living outside the norm. To want to break all of society’s conventions, there simply must be something wrong with us. (Maybe they are a little jealous too?) But life is what you make it out to be. Life is yours to create. We are all chained down by the burdens we place upon ourselves, whether they are bills, errands, or, like me, self-imposed blogging deadlines. If you really want something, you have to go after it. People who travel the world aren’t running away from life. Just the opposite. Those that break the mold, explore the world, and live on their own terms are running toward true living, in my opinion. We have a degree of freedom a lot of people will never experience. We get to be the captains of our ships. But it is a freedom we chose to have. We looked around and said, “I want something different.” And then we went for it. It was that freedom and attitude I saw in travelers years ago in Thailand that inspired me to do lead the life I am now. I saw them break the mold and I thought to myself, “Why not me?” I’m not running away. No. I am just running towards my own idea of a normal life. And I never plan to look back. How to Travel the World on $75 a DayMy New York Times best-selling book to travel will teach you how to master the art of travel so that you’ll get off save money, always find deals, and have a deeper travel experience. It’s your A to Z planning guide that the BBC called the “bible for budget travelers.” Click here to learn more and start reading it today! Book Your Trip: Logistical Tips and Tricks Book Your Flight Find a cheap flight by using Skyscanner. It’s my favorite search engine because it searches websites and airlines around the globe so you always know no stone is being left unturned. Book Your Accommodation You can book your hostel with Hostelworld. If you want to stay somewhere other than a hostel, use Booking.com as it consistently returns the cheapest rates for guesthouses and hotels. Don’t Forget Travel Insurance Travel insurance will protect you against illness, injury, theft, and cancellations. It’s comprehensive protection in case anything goes wrong. I never go on a trip without it as I’ve had to use it many times in the past. My favorite companies that offer the best service and value are: SafetyWing (best for budget travelers) World Nomads (best for mid-range travelers) InsureMyTrip (for those 70 and over) Medjet (for additional evacuation coverage) Want to Travel for Free? Travel credit cards allow you to earn points that can be redeemed for free flights and accommodation — all without any extra spending. Check out my guide to picking the right card and my current favorites to get started and see the latest best deals. Need a Rental Car? Discover Cars is a budget-friendly international car rental website. No matter where you’re headed, they’ll be able to find the best — and cheapest — rental for your trip! Need Help Finding Activities for Your Trip? Get Your Guide is a huge online marketplace where you can find cool walking tours, fun excursions, skip-the-line tickets, private guides, and more. Ready to Book Your Trip? Check out my resource page for the best companies to use when you travel. I list all the ones I use when I travel. They are the best in class and you can’t go wrong using them on your trip. The post Everyone Says I’m Running Away appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site. View the full article

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