Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i Fast Company

This was my first year overseeing the Most Innovative Companies issue as editor of Fast Company—and what a strange and thrilling time to be going through this process. For years, MIC has been led by deputy editor David Lidsky and senior editor Amy Farley. With tremendous rigor, Lidsky and Farley work with nearly every other member of our editorial staff (plus a dedicated crew of contributors) to ensure that we are definitively and defensibly identifying the most deserving companies. This year's endeavor had begun well before I arrived last summer, informed by Fast Company's daily reporting on business innovation. Then, over the past several months, our editorial team vetted thousands of applications, which included significant additional reporting. The project concluded with the selection of the year's 50 Most Innovative Companies…

WHEN TARIQ HASSAN, U.S. chief marketing officer at McDonald's, joined the Golden Arches in 2021, the company was trying to figure out how to expand on the cultural cachet it gained from its “Famous Orders” campaign, which asked stars such as Travis Scott, BTS, and Saweetie to share their go-to orders. In considering how to bolster the brand's relevance, Hassan says, “The biggest unlock we had was moving from talking brand to fan to truly talking fan to fan.” Fan to fan meant tapping into a preexisting TikTok trend of menu hacks, empowering customers to make new food creations, such as the Hash Brown McMuffin. McDonald's also launched a menu hacks campaign that encourages more people to get creative. In addition, the company lured people to its app with unique…

WHEN NUBANK CEO DAVID Vélez and his cofounders started the company in 2013, they were fed up with the process of banking in Brazil and wanted to offer more straightforward financial services. A decade later, Nubank has inspired dozens of copycat “neobanks” worldwide and grown into a publicly traded business with 75 million customers in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico—more than 19 million of whom joined in 2022. Nubank earned $7.8 million in profit in Q3 of 2022 on revenue of $1.3 billion. “As Latin Americans, we go through so much frustration as consumers,” Vélez says. “I wanted to challenge that.” To that end, last August Nubank rolled out Caixinhas, or money boxes, which have changed how people save money. They offer an alternative to undifferentiated savings accounts that actually lost…

Location: Utah Webtoon: The Kiss Bet (romance), 2018-present Views: 206.4 million Location: Trinidad Webtoon: Ordeol (action), 2021-present Views: 14.6 million (U.S. only) Location: South Korea Webtoon: True Beauty (romance), 2018-2022 Views: 6 billion Location: Nevada Webtoon: Lead artist of Vixen: NYC (superhero), 2022-present Views: 2.7 million Location: Virginia Webtoon: UnOrdinary (superhero), 2016-present Views: 1.3 billion Location: New Zealand Webtoon: Lore Olympus (romance), 2018-present Views: 1.5 million IT STARTED WHEN THE SCIENCE CLASS HAMster bit a student, who then passed the virus to the school nurse. Soon, the school was a mass of face-chewing zombies. Welcome to the world of All of Us Are Dead, the South Korean show that was Netflix's mostwatched non-English-language series last year. The story, though, began in 2009, as a digital comic on the platform Webtoon. Owned by South Korean tech…

“MOST COMPANIES DON'T have a clue what lives within their [network] environment,” says Nadir Izrael, cofounder and CTO of Armis, a cybersecurity firm focused on protecting clients by guarding their vast array of connected assets. Izrael and his cofounder, who cut their teeth in Israel's cybersecurity corps, Unit 8200, have built what Izrael calls a Google Maps for an organization's universe of devices, from laptops and smartphones to the growing number of so-called unmanaged machines—cash registers, warehouse robots, MRI devices, and the systems that keep electricity flowing and water potable. Each one of these is a potential entry point for theft, ransomware, and even nation-state cyberwarfare. The rise of remote work and an influx of connected devices has given hackers new opportunities, says Izrael, who notes that attacks on critical…

FASHION RETAILER ZARA rolled out a collection of little black dresses last winter made from a surprising ingredient: recycled carbon. Their polyester material was developed from ethanol created by the Skokie, Illinois–based startup LanzaTech at a plant adjacent to a Chinese steel mill. It's one of Lanza Tech's three commercial-scale facilities (all attached to Chinese manufacturing sites) that capture emissions before they can hit the air. The gases are diverted into LanzaTech bioreactors, where they are fermented into ethanol using microorganisms that have been tailored to feed on them. “Our [process] is just like a microbrewery, except we ferment carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide,” says CEO Jennifer Holmgren. Once the ethanol is created, LanzaTech's buyers and partners turn it into other materials, from jet fuel to clothing. To date,…

BEFORE Stranger Things’ season 4 became the most-watched English-language Netflix series of all time last spring, it swallowed New York City. Or so it seemed, thanks to an experiential marketing activation orchestrated by the creative agency Giant Spoon. The massive, 500-foot-high projection presented the spectacle of a mysterious rift slowly cracking open the facade of the Empire State Building, immersing viewers—on the street and on social media—in a light-and-sound show that took people into Stranger Things’ Upside Down. Giant Spoon credits its success to its cross-disciplinary approach. “We had traditional creatives concepting the campaign; we had social specialists coming in from the start to craft our outreach plan,” says chief creative offiofficer Ian Grody. “It was an Ocean's 11 of incredible people convening.” The firm added to its toolbox last year…

E.L.F. (WHICH STANDS for “eyes, lips, face”) may sit beside L'Oréal and Revlon on shelves at Walgreens, Ulta, and Target, but its leaders also view it as an entertainment company, servicing a huge audience of followers across its social platforms. “When you have 14 million people showing up on your doorstep every day,” says CMO Kory Marchisotto, “you can't just sell them a product, you have to entertain them.” Known for its affordable, fair-trade products and beloved “dupes” of high-end items, E.l.f. began partnering three years ago with marketer Movers+Shakers on inventive digital work that went viral. Its 2019 #eyeslipsface campaign, with original music by producer III Wayno, garnered 7 billion views. Today, E.l.f. is supercharging that strategy via usergenerated content. It debuted a short film last winter made of…

THREE YEARS after launching its flagship service for virtual hormone replacement therapy for transgender individuals, Folx Health now operates in nearly every state, and has offered its HRT Care Fund, which covers a year of hormones for eligible patients, to nearly 200 people. The company spent much of 2022 working to broaden its scope so that, as CEO Liana Douillet Guzmán says, Folx can offer the wider LGBTQ community “access to care that is not just affirming, but expert.” Folx's services now include primary care, sexual health, and family planning. Additionally, in August, the company added features tailored to mpox, which largely affected men who have sex with men, including online resources, screenings, and referrals to physicians who could administer the vaccine for the illness. Folx is now partnering with…

HAZEL HEALTH BRINGS NO-COST TELEHEALTHCARE INTO SCHOOLS FOR CHILdren who have a host of hurdles standing between them and a primary care physician, from housing insecurity to lack of insurance. Nearly two-thirds of the students in schools that offer Hazel qualify for free and reduced lunch. “Our model factors in all the things influencing care and works to address them,” says Travis Gayles, Hazel's chief health officer. The company, which offers primary care appointments in schools across 14 states, expanded its new teletherapy service last year to cover 50 school districts in nine states. For both primary care and teletherapy, Hazel allows kids to receive treatment at school or get a referral to an in-person appointment. (Hazel bills either insurers or the district.) Gayles says Hazel acts as “a bridge…

VALVE'S HANDHELD GAMing system, the Steam Deck, is more than just a beefed-up Nintendo Switch alternative. It's also a counterpoint to the closed platforms that now define consumer electronics. The $399 device, which debuted in February 2022, costs $100 more than a Switch, but it's better equipped to play the latest games at higher quality, and it draws on Valve's popular PC storefront, Steam, to offer a vast selection of titles. But the real breakthrough is the Steam Deck's built-in Linux-based desktop mode, which supports an array of other applications, from web browsers to rival game marketplaces, such as the Epic Games Store. Users can replace the entire operating system with a different one, such as Windows, and Valve provides instructions for those who want to tinker (along with recovery…

AS COMPANIES GROW, departments can becomesiloed, and less information gets shared among teams. Airtable CEO Howie Liu says larger companies require “a whole constellation of interconnected apps” to keep everyone on the same page and track progress. The low-code collaboration platform Airtable has always been “more of a Lego kit than a turnkey solution,” he says, allowing users to customize the platform. But as Airtable took off among ever larger businesses in recent years—80% of the largest U.S. companies reportedly now use the platform—Liu says his team noticed enterprise customers repeatedly “hacking together” different applications to connect with Airtable to suit their various needs, whether that's planning complex marketing campaigns or tracking budgets for different projects. To help facilitate these customizations, over the past year Airtable rolled out a Connected…

DON'TCALL EIGHT SLEEP a mattress company. Yes, it sells a connected mattress alongside its smart mattress cover, but “we don't employ a foam expert,” says Matteo Franceschetti, cofounder and CEO, who prefers the term “sleep technology company.” Last year, Eight Sleep debuted its Pod 3 mattress, which starts at $3,095 and comes with a suite of capabilities including automatic temperature regulation, sensors that track sleep phases, and a vibrating wakeup function. Even more remarkable, the company's Pod 3 mattress cover—starting at $2,195—brings much of the same technology, including twice as many onboard sensors as previous versions and algorithms that translate the data into metrics such as heart rate and respiratory rate, to almost any mattress. Using this data, Eight Sleep's AI-powered SleepOS gets to know users and adjusts their mattresses…

JIMMY DONALDSON, aka MrBeast, released just 15 videos in 2022 on his main YouTube channel, yet he managed to become the world's most-subscribed-to individual YouTuber. Those videos, in which he wowed viewers by building Willy Wonka's chocolate factory (in a tie-in with the launch of his Feastables line of chocolate bars and cookies) and exploring Antarctica for 50 hours, helped Donaldson cross the 125 million–subscriber mark. Perhaps even more remarkable, MrBeast pulled off a similar feat on TikTok, where he now has nearly 70 million followers. “We're going to keep playing around with even sub-one-minute stuff,” says Marc Hustvedt, president of MrBeast, Donaldson's North Carolina–based company. “It's an existentiallike threat to long-form YouTube.” The only question is whether shortform video can deliver as much ad revenue. But no other creator…

SINCE NOVEMBER 2000, the International Space Station has provided a unique microgravity platform for research in biology, medicine, materials science, and physics, as well as for observing Earth's atmosphere and deep space. But it's set to close by 2031. Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman Systems are all working on replacements, but so is Houstonbased Axiom Space—and it has a head start on all of them. It's the sole contractor building a commercial module that will be attached to the ISS—and eventually detach to become its own free-floating station. Last April, Axiom took a big step toward making that a reality by flying a successful precursor mission, sending a four-person crew to the ISS in the first-ever fully commercial human spaceflight. Axiom contracted with SpaceX to transport its crew and…

LOOKING TO improve employee satisfaction and intra-team connection isn't a new trend; highachieving businesses have long prioritized worker engagement, says author and workplace development expert Julie Winkle Giulioni. But the combination of a tight labor market and the aftermath of the pandemic created “a perfect storm” when it comes to employee apathy and restlessness. It's why we all read a million panicked takes about “quiet quitting” and the “Great Resignation” last year. As leaders wrestle with the different challenges of hybrid, remote, or fully back in person teams, more are realizing they need to meet the moment by refocusing on their most valuable resource. “When you don't have [employee engagement], you've got less discretionary effort. You've got productivity issues. You've got morale issues,” says Giulioni. “All it takes is a…

SPRING 2020 FELT LIKE A “NEARdeath business experience,” says Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, as bookings dropped 80% within a few weeks. It was also an opportunity to trim back the company's distracting side projects—tours, hotels, even an airline—and, he says, “focus on the core”: its home-rentals platform. Last spring, that work led to the biggest change to Airbnb in a decade: a redesign that lets people search accommodation by category, rather than just destination, which has the benefit of introducing travelers to places and properties they might have overlooked. The company then turned its attention to how it orients new hosts. To ease prospective ones onto the platform, Airbnb created its version of a Genius Bar last fall, allowing people to contact specialized support or match up with…

“IN ORDER FOR FOLKS TO invest more to tackle inaccessibility, they have to understand why,” says Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft's chief accessibility officer. Yet there's very little reliable information about people with disabilities. That insight inspired Microsoft and the World Bank, in collaboration with the Disability Data Initiative at Fordham University, to launch a project to gather more accurate information about the disability community worldwide. The goal is to collate the fragmented data that exists today and create a public-facing hub that will offer unprecedented visibility to policymakers and employers, among others. Microsoft is pairing this work with accessibility efforts throughout the company. In October, it launched its Adaptive Accessories kit, a system of joysticks, buttons, and directional pads that lets users build a computer setup that works for them. It…

RAMP COFOUNDER and CEO Eric Glyman may lead an enter-prise software company, but he's not the type of guy who relishes the hard sell. Instead, he likes to let Ramp's products, including a corporate card and spend management platform, do the talking. “We try to show the value first and let customers come to their own views,” Glyman says. If last year is any indication, Ramp's product-first, gimmick-free approach has struck a chord, especially with small-business owners. More than 13,000 businesses now use the platform, a threefold increase year over year. Ramp has issued more than 240,000 employee credit cards, providing the company with a steady stream of interchange income. In March 2022, Ramp disclosed that it had reached $100 million in annualized revenue. After introducing Bill Pay, software capable…

AVID RUNNERS CYCLE through multiple pairs of sneakers a year, and these days, many are wearing shoes from the Swiss company On. The brand was cofounded in 2010 by Iron man champion Olivier Bernhard, who partnered with a scientist to incorporate garden-hose sections into a shoe's midsole, creating a prototype of On's signature technology: soles constructed with hollowed-out tubes to give the foot a soft landing. The company, which has a following among athletes (Roger Federer is an investor) and everyday runners alike, has long had sustainable ambitions, including plans for a fully circular shoe-subscription service. The idea: Create a completely recyclable sneaker that's available to customers who sign up to receive a new pair every six months, the average life span of a highly used running shoe. “The hurdle…

WHEN OPEN-WORLD fantasy game Elden Ring hit video-game consoles last February, it landed like a block-buster film. FromSoftware, the game's Japanese developer, sold 12 million units (starting at $60) within two weeks, and the release was heralded with a tribute traditionally associated with major filmmakers—a lengthy New Yorker profile of the game's creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki, who is known for taking players into magical kingdoms that are anything but fairy tales. Over the previous decade, Miyazaki had established a reputation for punishingly difficult games with Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, in which you might take the role of a knight or magician to battle through labyrinths of lethal enemies. Along the way, the ghosts of other players who've died might warn you of what's around the bend … or trick you…

PEOPLE respond differently to the same medication. But the patient groups for clinical trials of new drugs are often not representative of the wider population, which can lead to uneven outcomes and inequities in healthcare. Pharma giant Bristol Myers Squibb has been making a major push to increase diversity in its clinical trials, part of a fiveyear, $150 million commitment. In 2022, 59% of BMS's active clinical trial sites were located in what it has termed “highly diverse” areas, and thanks to community outreach, Black men comprised nearly 18% of patients (up from 9% in 2021) in an ongoing trial for a treatment for prostate cancer, which is more prevalent and has a higher mortality rate in that demographic. BMS also partnered with the nonprofit Disability Solutions to better understand…

SINCE THE FIRST FORD F-150 rolled off the production line in 1974, customers have been relying on the rugged pickup truck for help in all manner of situations. But one thing it couldn't do, until last year: power your home for up to 10 days during an outage. That achievement is part of a host of features built into Ford's first all-electric truck, the F-150 Lightning, which began development in 2018 and went on sale in May 2022. The team behind the Lightning, led by veteran Ford engineer Linda Zhang, reimagined the nation's top-selling truck to both capitalize on its recognizable brand and win over EV skeptics. That meant creating a vehicle with capabilities on par with the original, while adding a host of premium features that justify the $56,000…

IN 2022, A YEAR EPITOmized by crypto's scams, frauds, and hacks, Chainalysis stood apart. Its mission is to trace public blockchain activity and catch the culprits. And though the data it uses is public, what Chainalysis does isn't easy. Criminals often transfer their loot through a complex series of intermediary crypto wallets meant to obscure its true destination. Even simple transactions can be opaque. “When you transfer an NFT to someone, you're using multiple services and it's very complicated,” says cofounder and CEO Michael Gronager. Last year, Chainalysis launched Storyline, a tool that makes those schemes clearer to customers by using artificial intelligence to narrow down the important data and building a visual timeline for any given crypto token as it travels through the system. Chainalysis's forensic prowess has earned…

LONDON-BASED ARTIFICIAL intelligence research lab DeepMind—founded in 2010 and acquired by Alphabet in 2014—built its reputation by developing AI that can beat humans across a range of difficult games, including chess, poker, and strategy game Go. Although these accomplishments display AI's cognitive and reasoning capabilities, providing useful benchmarks, DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis says the goal has always been “to develop general purpose algorithms using games as a convenient test platform, and apply them to real-world problems.” In July, DeepMind proved it's no longer just playing games, rolling out 200 million entries to AlphaFold, its open-access database of 3D protein structures, dwarfing the 350,000 that it launched with in summer 2021. The additional structures—basically, the entire protein universe—are a massive gift to scientists working in drug discovery, synthetic biology, and nanomaterials.…

CITYBLOCK Health was founded in 2017 to answer the question, as cofounder and CEO Toyin Ajayi puts it: “Why does it cost so much money to deliver care that doesn't actually drive the outcomes we would expect?” Cityblock provides healthcare services to Medicaid and dually eligible Medicare beneficiaries, who account for a disproportionate amount of dollars spent on healthcare in the U.S., according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. It blends primary care, behavioral health, and disease management services, taking into account environmental and societal factors—such as insecure housing and living in a food desert—that can lead to chronic health conditions and hospitalizations. The Brooklyn-based company, which raised nearly $600 million in 2021 and is valued at more than $6 billion, has about 100,000 members, and it recently expanded into Indiana…

LAST YEAR, THE SYDNEY SKYLINE GOT a strikingly modern addition: a 49-story office tower, built from a decades-old structure. The Quay Quarter Tower, in the city's historic Circular Quay, stands on the site of a 1976 skyscraper that Danish architecture firm 3XN repurposed to create the new building. More akin to a face-lift than a birth, this kind of large-scale structural reuse has clear environmental advantages. By incorporating 65% of the original building's floor plates and 95% of its concrete elevator shafts and stairwells into the new tower, 3XN reduced the overall material needs of the project. That slashed the so-called embodied carbon emissions that would have resulted from creating new concrete and steel for construction. The architects estimate that this approach saved 13,000 tons of embodied carbon, or the…

WEEKS BEFORE RUSSIA INvaded Ukraine last year, hackers accessed a financial institution's computers and set them up to initiate a cyberattack on Ukrainian government websites. What the hackers didn't know: Their efforts took place in a fake network designed as a detection environment by Spanish startup CounterCraft, which was able to protect its client's real computers and share information about the incident with U.S. authorities. “Being weeks ahead of the actual window of attack was a very useful place to be,” says Dan Brett, CounterCraft's cofounder and chief strategy officer. CounterCraft's deception tools turn the tables on hackers, luring them into digital labyrinths that waste their time and reveal their techniques while neutralizing the attack. Honeypots aren't new to cybersecurity, but CounterCraft's platform takes a more userfriendly approach. It automates…

AS THE PANDEMIC UNFOLDED, EDUcators grew more and more reliant on a vast array of digital tools. The average school district currently uses more than 1,400 edtech products each month, nearly three times the number they used just five years ago. Between this influx of new technology and funding requirements that mandate federal dollars go toward “evidence-based services,” schools are eager to prove that these digital solutions actually work. LearnPlatform helps educators analyze the efficacy of their edtech portfolio via its algorithms and automated data analysis that's fine-tuned by both data scientists and former educators. As of 2022, LearnPlatform has run more than 1,200 evaluations for districts that serve nearly 10 million students and teachers, and in 2021 its school customers ran more than 400 evaluations, saving an estimated $40…

LAST FEBRUARY, REGROW Ag founder and CEO Anastasia Volkova darted from a meeting with investment firm Galvanize Climate Solutions to the home of Regrow's COO, Manal Elarab. She wanted to share that the firm was planning to underwrite a Series B for Regrow, a tech platform that helps such companies as Nutrien, Bayer, Cargill, and John Deere reduce their carbon footprint by identifying the farmers and tools to make their supply chains more regenerative. But Elarab had a different announcement. “She said, ‘Have you seen the news?’” Volkova recalls, “‘Russia just invaded Ukraine.’” Volkova, who grew up in Ukraine, went from “being on the highest high professionally” to “spending the night thinking, This might be my last conversation with Mom.” In the following months, as she worked to extricate her…

AN EGG WENDS ITS WAY THROUGH YOUR HOUSE, WHICH has been transformed into an obstacle course. You're hanging out on a beach with the Latin American pop juggernaut Bad Bunny, listening to his album Un Verano Sin Ti with his friends. These surreal, clever experiences are the product of 3dar, an animation studio started in Buenos Aires by two filmmakers and brothers. As 3dar has grown its profile in animation, it's also become a leader in virtual and augmented reality, using the immersive technologies to engage users more fully in its stories. The company—one of Meta's biggest AR filter partners in Latin America last year, creating selfie filters and social games for Instagram and Facebook—also earned a Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival in September for Eggscape. That's the…

ON A BRIGHT MONDAY MORNING AT THE END OF JANUARY, THE SIX-PERSON LEADERSHIP TEAM BEHIND CHATGPT—THE MOST ADVANCED AI CHATBOT EVER TO BE DEPLOYED TO AMASS AUDIENCE—GATHERS FOR ITS WEEKLY MEETING. IT'S TAKING PLACE IN OPENAI'S San Francisco headquarters, a former factory that's now home to 375 researchers, engineers, and policy specialists—the people responsible for creating the breakthrough technology. Past the building's imposing gate, through a courtyard edged by palm trees, and down the hall from a pebble fountain that emits a spalike burble, the team members arrive at a snug conference room, laptops in hand. OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati takes a seat at the center of the table. Winter sunshine filters through a row of casement windows and a cluster of hanging plants. Murati, her hair drawn…

AT ROBLOX, THE metaverse isn't just a futuristic vision dependent on mind-blowing technology that's yet to emerge from the lab. The company has built an immersive 3D universe that's here right now—and attracts more than 60 million daily users on PCs, Macs, Xbox consoles, tablets, and phones. In 2022, those fans got to attend virtual performances by Lizzo, Mariah Carey, Elton John, and the Chainsmokers, and were courted by brands such as Burberry, Gucci, H&M, and Walmart, all of which chose Roblox for their maiden metaverse voyages. These notable names signal a new era for the platform, which originated as an educational game for gradeschoolers. More than half of users are now over 13, and the company recently rolled out new “experience guidelines”—akin to movie ratings—designed to help both kids…

FROM THE MOMENT BE-yoncé dropped her Renaissance dance album in late July, fans started anticipating the music videos. In October, they finally got something approximating one: a scene, set to the song “Summer Renaissance,” of Beyoncé dancing in a Studio 54-style disco, sparkling in a gem-encrusted minidress and chain-link necklace. Except it wasn't a music video. It was an ad for Tiffanv & Co. For the past two years, America's most influential celebrity has joined forces with America's most storied luxury brand. The marriage of these two icons, which encapsulates a distinctly American vision of luxury and cultural power, was orchestrated by 30-year-old Alexandre Arnault, who became Tiffany's executive vice president of product and communications when his family's conglomerate, LVMH, acquired the jeweler in January 2021 for $15.8 billion. “Part…

IN JUST ONE YEAR-FROM December 9, 2021, when baristas in Buffalo cast their first votes, through the end of 2022—Starbucks workers managed to unionize 271 cafés in 36 states, a feat that turned a largely grassroots organizing campaign into the most prominent face of America's renewed labor movement. The drive converted a new Starbucks store every 1.5 days, added 7,200 workers to organized labor's ranks, and accounted for one-fifth of all the union victories recorded in America last year. The effort was led by Starbucks employees and shepherded by Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union. Workers United quietly advised the growing national network of baristas while assembling a team of lawyers and letting workers speak for themselves. In May, Starbucks announced that workers at nonunion stores…

IN A BID TO BRING CHIP MANufacturing stateside, Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act last July, granting generous subsidies to semiconductor companies like Intel and Micron. But even as these companies break ground on new factories, they're up against a greater hurdle: a shortage of U.S. semiconductor engineers. To help address this talent gap, Purdue University launched the country's first interdisciplinary Semiconductor Degrees Program, offering undergraduate- and graduate-level training both in person and online, along with associate degrees through a partnership with the Ivy Tech network of community colleges. More than 20 executives from major chip companies sit on an advisory board to help develop the curriculum—and recruit future employees. Some of these corporate partners will soon have a physical footprint nearby: Purdue has unveiled plans to open a…

AFTER A two-year delay due to the pandemic, Minions: The Rise of Gru hit theaters—and theaters onlylast July The film went on to gross $939 million at the global box office, and proved that the appeal of the nonsense-jabbering yellow creatures that made their feature debut more than a decade ago lives mightily on. The decision not to debut Gru on a streaming platform points to the resolve and fearlessness of Illumination, the company behind the Minions franchise, and its parent, Universal. “The tendency was to look for the safest paths forward,” says Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri. “Holding the film was obviously a very different path.” This unorthodoxy extends to the way Illumination built awareness for the film. Its generosity with its intellectual property helped fuel fan fervor:…

A KEY PART OF CANva's appeal is its elegance, and in the decade since launching, the graphic-design platform has retained its simple UI while continuously integrating powerful new technologies. Last year, Canva unveiled an upgrade (Visual Worksuite) that includes a virtual copywriting assistant: Magic Write. It harnesses the power of Open AI's GPT-3 to generate text for users’ documents, based on their prompts, everything from meetingagenda bullet points to marketing briefs. It also allows users to experiment with ideas. “Being able to brainstorm when someone's not there in the room with you is the core use case we've seen,” says cofounder and chief product officer Cameron Adams. An integration with Stable Diffusion's opensource image-generating AI similarly lets users quickly turn written ideas into illustrations for documents. Visual Worksuite also includes…

REGARDLESS OF THE inner turmoil that resulted in November's news that longtime CEO Bob Iger was returning to unseat his handpicked successor, Disney has managed to do right by Mickey, Iron Man, Luke Skywalker, and all their friends. The company kept its Marvel content fresh during year 15 of its unparalleled run, thanks to stylish campaigns for Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Wakanda Forever, anchored by Angela Basset in a superhero role with remarkable gravitas. Then there was the metamarketing gambit that inserted Marvel Studios’ creative process into SheHulk's story line. Disney was 2022's top-grossing film studio for the seventh straight year, drawing in $4.9 billion globally Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ have grown by 57 million subscribers to hit more than 235 million,…

WHEN LIANA DOUILLET GUZMÁN WAS TRYING TO HAVE A BABY IN 2015, she had insurance that would pay for IVF—just not for her. In order to be eligible, Guzmán had to be able to say she'd had more than a year of unsuccessful heterosexual sex. One problem: Her partner was a woman. “When you think about the LGBTQI community, the incumbent [healthcare] system, at best, wasn't built for us. And actually, more often than not, it's openly discriminatory,” says Guzmán, who eventually paid out of pocket. Today, Guzmán is CEO of the telehealth platform Folx Health, which launched in 2019 to deliver gender-affirming care to trans patients, particularly those who live in areas where healthcare providers are unable (or unwilling) to address their needs; according to a survey from the…

AFTER nearly six years in stealth mode, Ultima Genomics stunned the scientific community in May 2022 by announcing a breakthrough in DNA sequencing: Its UG 100 machine could sequence an entire human genome for just $100—a sixfold reduction in current cost. Ultima CEO Gilad Almogy says that the lower fee is essential to using sequencing more widely to develop predictive diagnostics and next-gen treatments. With cancer, for instance, frequent genome sequencing could allow researchers to see mutations earlier. But it would require “many orders of magnitude more sequencing than is done today,” says Almogy. To create a more affordable machine, Ultima uses a standard 200 mm semiconductor wafer disc, which can be sourced easily at a low cost and allows for faster imaging. The machine places DNA samples on the…

EVEN AS PRICES HAVE soared, heightening food insecurity, the average grocery store discards up to $10,000 worth of items every day. “Food waste is such a stupid problem,” saysjosh Domingues, founder and CEO of Flashfood. “We have so many people who are hungry, and so much food going to waste.” Flashfood's mission is to divert food from landfills—where it emits methane that contributes to global warming—and onto people's plates. The fiveyear-old startup created an app that lets grocers alert shoppers to food that's nearing its expiration date (mostly meat, dairy, and produce) and offer them instant discounts—an average of 50%—to purchase those items. Shoppers buy the products in-app, before collecting them from dedicated Flashfood fridges and dry racks instore. (Flashfood takes a small percentage from each transaction.) For grocers, that…

HALLOWEEN. THAT'S the tell for Eventbrite. If the haunted yacht cruises and cemetery tours are reaching out to the event planning and digital ticketing platform to list and promote their events, then the Thanksgiving Eve bar crawls, holiday light shows, and New Year's Eve specials will follow. During Halloween 2022, the number of paid events on Eventbrite grew 30% over 2019, and ticket volume beat the company's prior record by more than 50%. The reinvigorated enthusiasm for live experiences has been a boon to Eventbrite's fortunes—and a success made possible only because Julia Hartz, cofounder and CEO, has spent the past few years effectively refounding the company, which she created with her husband, Kevin, and their technical cofounder Renaud Visage in 2006. After the pandemic hit in March 2020, Eventbrite…

VIDEO COMMUNICATION has become de rigueur since the pandemic, but rather than just moving a meeting from a conference room to a screen, Loom does something different. It takes the short-form video phenomenon and turns it into an effective way for businesses to pitch clients, explain how a product works, or share information internally. Think of it like TikTok for enterprises. By allowing customers to create short videos (up to five minutes long) that can be watched anytime and shared as needed, the eight-year-old company helps its 18 million users across 350,000 businesses eschew time-sucking scheduled video meetings, both internally and externally. Those clients—which include Netflix, HubSpot, and P&G's Tide brand—have been using it a lot. As of December, more than 215 million “looms” had been recorded. A recent survey…

AS MACHINE learning transforms business processes across an array of industries—from finance to medicine to travel—it's essential to root out flaws which, if left unchecked, could have catastrophic consequences. Robust Intelligence is a Bay Area company focused on mitigating AI risks, helping organizations continuously validate AI models and data, and looking for anomalous behaviors and weaknesses. This allows data science teams to more quickly and efficiently test the robustness of a model's performance, fairness, and security. Robust Intelligence's AI Firewall software can also prevent bad data from entering production models by looking for anomalies in real time. Last year, Robust Intelligence won new customers that include JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte, and Hitachi; cosponsored a pair of competitions focused on algorithmic integrity; and helped back a first-of-its-kind bug bounty focused on AI…

COMPANIES IN COLOR= Top 50 companies PLUS: 540 HONOREES FROM ADVERTISING TO WORKPLACE ▲ ADVERTISING 1. Giant Spoon 2. TBWA Worldwide 3. Wieden+ Kennedy 4. Majority 5. Ogilvy 6. The Martin Agency 7. Johannes Leonardo 8. Mischief @ No Fixed Address 9. MNTN 10. WPP ■ AGRICULTURE (See page 76) • ARCHITECTURE 1. 3XN 2. MAD Architects 3. Page & Turnbull 4. Henning Larsen 5. ZGF Architects 6. Carmody Groarke 7. Warren and Mahoney 8. Marvel Architects 9. Michael Heizer 10. Architectural Workers United ▲ ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE 1. OpenAI 2. DeepMind 3. Builder.ai 4. Abnormal Security 5. Speechmatics 6. Unlearn 7. Pano AI 8. Signifyd 9. Nvidia 10. Voxel ■ AUGMENTED REALITY AND VIRTUAL REALITY 1. Unity 2. Coca-Cola 3. Meta 4. Google 5. Innersloth 6. Niantic 7. Rendever 8.…

FLEXIBLE DISPLAYS HAVE CAPTIVATED THE imagination since they were first invented in 1974, in a lab where so many pioneering technologies were born: Xerox PARC in Palo Alto. But the path from lab to mainstream consumer electronics has been famously difficult. Samsung was the first to sell a consumer electronics device with flexible display technology. Its Samsung Galaxy Round—a phone-tablet hybrid that featured a curved 5.7-inch screen that mimicked the shape of a slightly cupped hand—hit consumers’ hands in 2013. For the past decade, Samsung has iterated on the technology, and this past holiday season it released the Galaxy Z Flip4 and Fold4 phones, which finally feel like more than just proofs of concept. The Fold4, in particular, is a revelation, with a screen that unfurls into a small tablet.…

HOW DO FOUR SEPTUAGEnarian Swedish pop stars pull off a dazzlingly energetic 20-song set list before thousa nds of fans in a custom-built stadium? Easy: They get their holograms to do it. ABBA Voyage, a stunning marriage of art and technology architected by the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), has been a critical and financial success. It's also a symbol of how the live performance industry is being transformed by technology, as digital elements are deployed to deepen fan immersion while staying true to what makes a live music experience so irreplicable. With concerts becoming increasingly visual extravaganzas, artists have access to new mediums to explore their creative impulses. ILM worked closely with ABBA to develop their de-aged avatars; the foursome spent five weeks with the visual…

IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO SCORE A ticket to catch a Savannah Bananas baseball game at the team's 4,000-seat Grayson Stadium—the wait-list for a home game is now half a million people deep—you might see a player step up to home plate wearing 10-foot stilts or swinging a flaming bat. And the guy in the bananayellow Mad Hatter getup dancing atop the dugout? That's the team's co-owner, Jesse Cole. The team, which has more than 30 million TikTok followers, once competed in the Coastal Plain League, but dropped out last year to pursue its version of sports-based entertainment via exhibition matches. “We're a circus that happens to have a ball game break out in the middle of it,” says Savannah Bananas director of entertainment Zack Frongillo. “We spend zero dollars…