Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2025 - Issue 67 i Fast Company South Africa

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about innovation. Amid all the noise, talk and terminology—and those seeking to claim the mantle of “innovator”—it’s easy to get confused. Clarity often gets lost. In this issue, we’ve tried to provide a clearer picture of where innovation stands across the globe. For years, students of innovation have hailed Elon Musk as a standard-bearer. From Tesla to SpaceX, everything he touched seemed to turn to gold. But this year marks a shift in that narrative, with his companies notably absent from our Most Innovative Companies 2025 list. Musk’s involvement in political matters has diverted focus away from the breakthroughs that once defined him. Some might argue he was attempting to make an entire country more innovative—an ambitious goal, but one that has seen limited…

For new entrepreneurs, the journey from idea to funding—and then to market—can seem challenging. It’s not just about having a great idea; it’s about shaping that idea into a story that makes others believe in it just as much as you do. As I immersed myself in this topic recently, I found myself reminiscing about the Gauteng Township Entrepreneurship Competition—a vibrant showcase of grit, innovation and youthful ambition. I met many passionate entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas. But one thing stood out: While funding was often the number one ask, it wasn’t always the number one need. What many of these young founders truly needed was support, mentorship and access to markets. That, however, is a conversation for another day; let’s talk about something even more immediate—the pitch. Because if you…

DISCOVERY, A COMPANY THAT STARTED BACK IN 1992 offering medical aid, is today one of the most innovative in South Africa. A closer look at its subsidiary companies reveals the impressive suite of solutions they have developed based on gathered data. Discovery Insure, among other subsidiaries of the Discovery group, incorporates this gathered data in the delivery of its services. The data forms the basis for the rewards it offers users. What is deeply impressive is the influence this has had on driver behaviour. In South Africa, which has one of the highest road accident rates in the world, there’s no doubt that the Discovery Insure solution is adding immense value to society. But Discovery is not only using such gathered data to improve driver behaviour; it also uses it…

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

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

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

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

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

Given current perceptions about Facebook (now Meta), it’s hard to remember there was once a time when the social media and networking giant was a much-loved company. During this honeymoon period, people such as Sarah Wynn-Williams—a public policy expert from New Zealand—wanted more than anything else to work for the company. Wynn-William believed Facebook needed her experience to help navigate what she saw as a possible future for the company. She understood the significant potential of the Facebook platform and wanted the company to hire her as director of public policy. In Careless People, she explains that she thought the platform could make a difference. Among other things, she relates how Facebook helped connect people in New Zealand after the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. But Wynn-Williams’ attitude towards Facebook changed after…

BEN COLLINS CEO LEILA BRILLSON Chief marketing officer DANIELLE STRLE Chief product officer JEFF LAWSON Owner IN EARLY 2024, BEN COLLINS WAS CONTEMPLATING the future of the media business—and his place in it. He was in the process of resigning after spending six years as a senior reporter at NBC News, exhausted by the disinformation beat that took him to some of the darkest and most disturbing corners of the internet. It hadn’t helped that in December 2022 NBC News had suspended Collins from the Elon Musk beat following his highly critical coverage of the gazillionaire’s acquisition of Twitter. The media landscape looked bleak. Layoffs were decimating storied media titles such as Sports Illustrated, and Collins was hearing rumors that G/O Media, the holding company owned by private equity firm…

WAYMO NVIDIA NUBANK WNBA BYD GLEAN ABRIDGE ESSILORLUXOTTICA ROCKET LAB DUOLING O YOUTUBE DEEPSEEK CAVA NOTION PGLANG ROBINHOOD BLUESKY ON INFINITUM ICEYE INTUIT DOME FX LIFE TIME UNSTRUCTURED BUDDERFLY ANYSPHERE SHARKNINJA SIMBE ROBOTICS EA SPORTS NUVOCARGO HUNTRESS ATHLETIC BREWING TUBI ARS PHARMA FIGMA CHAINALYSIS HISTOSONICS NUULY CRUNCHYROLL HOMECOURT PORT OF PORTLAND ZERO FOODPRINT LIQUID DEATH ALLOY DEVELOPMENT WONDER WATCH DUTY SIMPLECLOS URE FRIDA ZINC ENTANGLED PUBLISHING…

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

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

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

TRADITIONAL METHODS OF SIGNing up a customer for short-term insurance are changing, with submitting an application online giving way to “embedded” insurance, which seamlessly integrates cover into the purchase of a product or service, often at the point of sale. Enter Pineapple, an insurtech company that allows access to insurance via an app. Its embrace of embedded insurance allows people to insure their goods through their mobile devices, using the camera to snap a picture of the item the user wishes to insure. An AI picks up what the item is, allowing the user to choose and buy the recommended monthly premium. While other companies also offer insurance via an app, Pineapple stands out due to its focus on transparency, affordability, and its unique digital-first approach—including a rewards system. Unused…

SAFETY AND SECURITY CHALLENGES in South Africa have inspired those in the security tech field—including local government entities, startups, and major tech companies—to develop solutions that allow people to call for help in an emergency. A common denominator in these efforts is a little-known company called AURA. The technology platform was born in 2017 out of a critical need to make private emergency and security response services more accessible and affordable. Today, it is the country’s largest response network for more than 2,500 security and medical responders. The company has developed smart emergency response devices that instantly connects those in need of top-tier, private armed and medical responders—anytime, anywhere. The platform has enabled Samsung to build their personal emergency SAMSUNG SOS+ service, which connects users to a nationwide network of…

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

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

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

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

AROUND THE START OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, BEING ABLE TO say you had developed a startup in a garage or on a university campus counted as a badge of honour. Apple’s first computers were developed in Steve Jobs’ family garage in Los Altos, California. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, while Michael Dell initially ran his eponymous computer business from his University of Texas dormitory. Google, now the world’s most used web-based search engine, also got going in a rented garage. In big cities, where space came at a premium, launching a startup was expensive. This started to change in 2010, after the establishment of WeWork—a company co-founded by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey— that took the concept of “co-working spaces” to a new level. And reduced…

FAME WEEK AFRICA SEPTEMBER 1-6 CAPE TOWN FAME Week Africa is more than just an event—it’s a celebration of creativity, collaboration and culture, uniquely positioned at the heart of Africa’s entertainment and media industries. Whether you’re an aspiring artist, an established professional or a cultural enthusiast, here are ten compelling reasons why attending FAME Week Africa should be a priority. www.fameweekafrica.com FAST COMPANY INNOVATION FESTIVAL SEPTEMBER 15-18 NEW YORK The 11th annual Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York will bring together thousands of business leaders, makers and innovators for four days of inspired conversations, purposeful networking, engaging activations and concrete takeaways. www.fastcompany.com BLOCKCHAIN AFRICA CONFERENCE OCTOBER 30 JOHANNESBURG The 11th edition of the Blockchain Africa Conference—hosted by Bitcoin Events— will take place in Gauteng. Since its inception in 2015,…