Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2019 i Fast Company

Is innovation dead? From some angles, it might look that way. Many of the companies we expect to churn out breakthrough technologies are instead, and rightly, focused on rebuilding trust with their employees, customers, and local communities. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post that he spent almost all of last year on issues regarding free speech, privacy, and well-being. (For more on Facebook’s privacy woes, check out Shoshana Zuboff’s probing essay on page 16.) It is hard to imagine he’s had much time to code or plot new products. But look closer, as Fast Company did in researching our 12th annual Most Innovative Companies list, and you’ll see that the innovative spark remains strong—just elsewhere. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is making it easier for physicians to…

what’s your best habit, and what’s your worst one? My best habit is that I start Monday mornings by putting pen to paper and writing a to-do list—a brain dump of work and home stuff I need to get done. I do this before opening my laptop or reviewing any notifications on my phone. I flag the three most important things that need to happen and get a lot of satisfaction from crossing them off. My worst habit is that I self-censor. I tend to think too carefully, even when I’m setting goals. I try to have some mechanism in place for self-reflection—like journaling—so that I can better reflect on my past mind-sets when I’m looking ahead. when i’m creatively stuck, i… Walk, then do the simplest version of the…

Advertising 1. Wieden+ Kennedy For staying two steps ahead of the culture—for Nike, KFC, and more 2. Giant Spoon For creating a live West-world experience 3. BBDO For sparking debates about race and bullying 4. Gimlet Media For translating its audio prowess into sponsored Alexa skills 5. Accenture Interactive For leading the merger of strategic consulting, ad tech, and creative work 6. Means Media For nominating a new style of political campaign ad for progressives 7. Droga5 For pulling off the stunt that flipped IHOP into a burger joint 8. Inamoto & Co For bringing Uniqlo into the AI age 9. TBWA\Worldwide For finding fresh ways to polish Apple’s brand 10. John x Hannes For putting its heart into its CorazÓn short for the Montefiore hospital system Africa 1. African…

“Where gamers go, everyone else follows,” says Sara Clemens, COO of Twitch, the video service owned by amazon. Once the domain of video-game aficionados, Twitch is now pulling in mainstream viewers with its vision for the future of live TV. last fall, it reworked its IRL channel to promote subcategories for cooking, fitness, and talk shows. The switch reflects how a new generation of nongaming creators is using Twitch’s interactive tools to chat with audiences and let them dictate the action (usually for a small fee). Twitch also regularly hosts TV show marathons (Doctor Who; Bob ross’s The Joy of Painting), and it broadcast the amazon Thursday night NFl games this past season with color commentary from some of its streamer community.…

AnchorFree’s Hotspot Shield VPN, software that encrypts users’ online activity, was downloaded 100 million times in 2018 (up from 70 million in 2017). “Amid every global security or censorship event, we have massive spikes in usage,” says cofounder and CEO David Gorodyansky, who saw a rise in internet users seeking anonymity during the July 2018 protests in Iraq. Last year, AnchorFree added malware and phishing protections, making it valuable for activists and average web surfers alike.…

Early one morning in April 2017, a series of horrific photos and videos began hitting Facebook and YouTube showing civilians in a rebel-held area of northern Syria writhing on the ground and gasping for oxygen as deadly sarin-based gas—which witnesses said was dropped from the sky by the Syrian government—filled their lungs. It was one of the worst chemical attacks in the country’s nearly decade-long conflict, yet the United Nations Security Council failed to adopt a resolution to intervene. They were stymied by Russia and its allies, who dismissed the visual evidence as staged. “Other countries—people who wanted to deny the reality of what was going on in Syria—undermined the validity of user-generated content,” says Mounir Ibrahim, who was serving as an adviser to then UN Ambassador Nikki Haley at…

Last year, Domino’s tallied more than 60% of its U.S. sales via digital orders, achieved its 30th straight quarter of same-store sales growth, and saw its stock rise 22% in a tumultuous market. These milestones were driven by the company’s efforts to get its pies into people’s hands as quickly as possible, including geofencing public parks to enable outdoor delivery and challenging cities to improve their roads in a cheeky, faux-PSA campaign. “The Grubhubs and Uber Eats of the world will [challenge] us,” says Art D’Elia, Domino’s chief brand and innovation officer. “We need to keep pushing ourselves to maintain our advantage.” Here’s a look at the company’s 45-year history of deploying product, tech, and marketing to pioneer advances in ordering and delivery. 1973 The 30-Minute Guarantee The promise that…

Consumer Electronics 1. Apple For advancing the art of silicon design 2. Kano For making magic with Harry Potter and Star Wars cobranded coding kits 3. Google For raising its game with the Pixel 3 and Home 4. Microsoft For giving everyone a turn with its Xbox Adaptive Controller 5. Sensory For waking up 2 billion devices with its voice AI 6. Starry For showing the potential of 5G with its wireless network to the home 7. Corning For toughening up our glass screens with enhanced scratch resistance and contrast 8. Dell For transforming electronic waste into jewelry and ocean plastic into laptop packaging 9. Plume Labs For helping us breathe easier with its personal air-pollution sensor 10. Adero For rethinking the lost-keys sensor into a suite of connected-device trackers…

As CEO of Kano, which makes kits that let anyone code and build their own computerized toys, Alex Klein is on a mission to “give [people] an understanding of—and influence over—the tech in their lives.” In October, Klein launched the Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit, a $99 wand-building set that teaches users how to program accelerometers, magnetometers, and gestural controls—all while creating spells that make fireworks or cause objects to levitate on a computer screen. Kano sold more than 150,000 wands in its first two months of availability. Up next? A Star Wars–themed kit.…

Last spring, a steel mill in a city east of Beijing began transforming carbon emissions into fuel, thanks to a first-of-its-kind bioreactor filled with microbes that eat waste gases and produce ethanol—as many as 16 million gallons a year at the mill. The six-year-old Chicago-area biotech company LanzaTech designed the system, which can be used at a variety of industrial sites, in an effort “to show the world that carbon reuse is feasible, possible, and can make economic sense,” says CEO Jennifer Holmgren. The company is now scaling further. Last summer, LanzaTech broke ground on a bioreactor at a Belgian mill owned by Arcelor-Mittal, the world’s largest steel producer, which hopes to embed the technology at its sites around the globe to reduce its carbon footprint. LanzaTech systems are also…

“Early on, we thought: How do we deconstruct the services and operations of a hotel, and [rebuild] them in the age of mobile phones?” says Francis Davidson, founder and CEO of the short-term apartment-rental company Sonder. Combining Airbnb-like rooms with the consistency of a stylish boutique-hotel chain, Sonder has knit together a network of more than 2,000 rentals in 18 cities across North America and Europe over the past seven years. This year, it plans to open another 2,000 as it moves into new cities. The key to its growth: The San Francisco–based Sonder contracts with property developers to lease entire floors in their buildings. It saves money by doing away with amenities like front desks (its app assigns each guest a room-access code) and by outsourcing maintenance and housekeeping…

For his first game as an L.A. Laker last October, Kyle Kuzma entered the Staples Center in a pair of vintage 2003 Nike Zoom Flights. It was partially to honor teammate LeBron James, who had worn the style for his NBA debut, but also to build awareness. Not for Nike: Kuzma isn’t a spokesperson. He’s the first brand ambassador for GOAT, the online sneaker-resale platform. Since its 2015 launch, GOAT has grown into a premium lifestyle brand with more than 150,000 sellers, 10 million customers, and 750,000 shoes for sale. Last year, dozens of its sellers each moved more than $10 million worth of kicks, which can run upwards of $10,000 a pair. GOAT typically takes a 9.5% commission. Savvy partnerships (Versace tapped the company to sell its Chain Reaction…

Pro sports teams can now create merchandise that responds to fan demand near instantaneously, thanks to online retailer Fanatics. The company offers a new low-bandwidth shopping site that works in stadiums with poor cell service, and a platform for predicting demand using myriad digital cues. As a result, NFL merch sales rose 50% last year and Fanatics won deals with major European soccer clubs and e-sports’ Overwatch League. Here’s how goals become gear. 1. Instant Replay The Fanatics platform combines social listening, game data, and a pro team’s website activity to anticipate what people will want. When Khalil Mack scored a surprise touchdown in his first game as a chicago Bear, Fanatics was able to generate a Mack jersey and put it on sale by halftime. it sold more in…

Modern Fertility began selling its $159 home fertility test last May, the first to measure eight reproduction-related hormones from a finger-prick sample. Recent medical advances have made finger-prick testing routine for drug analysis, nutrition monitoring, and HIV screening, but it wasn’t widely applied to fertility testing until Modern Fertility and its partner labs ran studies that confirmed the method’s accuracy for measuring target hormones. Previously, tests for these hormones required drawing blood and spending up to $1,500 at a clinic. Cofounder Afton Vechery hopes that Modern Fertility’s affordable test will become “as routine as a pap smear,” and appeal not just to the one in six couples who have trouble conceiving but to any woman interested in becoming pregnant in the future.…

REVENUE GROWTH 125+% 2017–2018 ACCOUNT GROWTH Number of accounts in millions 4.2 MILLION 2 MILLION new customers have opened acorns accounts in the past 12 months. “Don’t make people do the math,” says Noah Kerner, CEO of digital-investment pioneer acorns, which is on a mission to help people squirrel away money as effortlessly as possible. The company launched in 2014 with a product that rounds up users’ daily purchases to the nearest dollar and automatically puts the difference into investment accounts; a growing stable of brand partners (320 and counting) offer further contributions for qualifying purchases. last year, acorns began offering its 4.2 million users the ability to open an ira, along with a checking account and debit card that link to the company’s investment products. it also redesigned its…

According to a fairly recent study available on the prestigious search engine Google, more babies are born on Tuesday than on any other day. “Morries” make up a huge percentage of America’s workforce. While it’s important to avoid stereotypes, Morries are lazy and entitled job hoppers who tend to have facial piercings, explosive cackles, and a peculiar affinity for microwave-reheated brussels sprouts. Managed poorly, they will erode morale and productivity at your workplace and ultimately destroy the global economy. A few simple guidelines can help harness Morries and stave off financial disaster. 1. ADOPT CLEAR ANTIDAYIST POLICIES Holidays tend to fall on mondays; the fun stuff happens on Fridays. Wednesday is hump day, and thursday is practically Friday. Find ways to enliven the most neglected day of the week with…

Our annual ranking of the businesses making the most profound impact on both industry and culture showcases a variety of ways to thrive in today’s volatile world. Stitch Fix is using data to improve the $334 billion apparel business (while also leading on issues of workplace equality and work-life balance). Truepic is employing advanced digital forensics—and the blockchain—to counter the scourge of image manipulation. Sweetgreen, Oatly, and Target are engaging customers by elevating salads, oat milk, and everyday essentials into must-haves. Read on to learn how these and 45 other companies are creating the future today, plus see our top-10 lists of the Most Innovative Companies by category, from advertising to wellness.…

Plenty of venerable media empires aspire to be players in the streaming wars. None is better positioned than Disney, which retooled its organization to deliver its own video services rather than license content to Netflix. “We’ll do a better job than others,” says direct-to-consumer chief Kevin Mayer. “We know [our] brands viscerally.” Disney+, a family-friendly streaming service debuting late this year, will mine Disney’s unparalleled portfolio, including new Star Wars, Avengers, and Monsters, Inc. shows; the Fox acquisition gives the company even more content assets, plus control of Hulu and its 25 million customers. In 2018, Disney launched the ESPN+ streaming service and racked up a million subscribers in five months—valuable experience, Mayer says, as it learns to convert loyal fans into paying customers.…

Nine years after launching its credit-card-reading dongle for smartphones, Square continues to find ways to make payments less painful. In October, the company introduced Square Terminal: a single-screen card-reading device (picture a smartphone resting on an angled white base) that offers wireless connectivity, a touch screen, and receipt-printing capability. Just as important, the chic device does not resemble “a 1985 calculator, like most other terminals,” says Jesse Dorogusker, Square’s hardware lead. The $400 Terminal may help the company maintain its robust growth: Square handled $23 billion in transactions in its last quarter, up 29% year over year. Cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey has expanded Square’s portfolio of services to include payroll, loans, appointment scheduling, and more. That means the Terminal isn’t just a sexy piece of hardware—it’s also a gateway…

One room is full of sequins and kids’ clothes. Another has lamps and tables, and yet another houses beakers of various dishwashing detergents. This is Target’s Minneapolis-based design lab, where Julie Guggemos, the company’s senior VP of product design, leads the creation of hundreds of thousands of items for the company’s in-house brands. Over the past three years, she has launched more than 20 private-label lines, including mid-century modern furnishings (Project 62), bright and quirky kids’ clothes (Cat & Jack), electronics (Heyday), and personal care and home goods (Smartly). Six of Target’s owned lines now do more than $1 billion in annual sales. Women’s fashion label A New Day, created in 2017, reached $1 billion in its inaugural year; Cat & Jack became a $2 billion business just as quickly.…

Apple’s most impressive new product of 2018 wasn’t a phone or a tablet, but a chip: the A12 Bionic. Debuting in last fall’s iPhones, it’s the industry’s first processor based on a seven-nanometer manufacturing process. The A12’s 6.9 billion transistors deliver dramatically faster performance, lower power consumption, and more raw muscle for intensive applications such as AI, AR, and high-end photography. At a time when it remains tougher than ever to induce consumers to upgrade, as proven by Apple’s surprise January move to cut revenue guidance on sluggish iPhone sales, the innovative chip design positions the company to create a whole new generation of irresistible experiences.…

Mobile apps now allow consumers to trade stocks and crypto (Robinhood), save money (Acorns and Qapital), and make payments (Venmo)—and most have one thing in common: Plaid. Its technology, a suite of banking APIs, enables developers to connect new digital tools to legacy financial systems. A quarter of Americans with bank accounts now use services powered by Plaid, up from 13% in January 2018. Last year, the company launched Assets to automate asset verification for loan applicants. “We’ve digitized that process so it only takes a couple minutes,” says cofounder and CEO Zach Perret.…

Airtable is a cloud-based workflow system that lets anyone—from intern to CEO—analyze data in a non-scary way. The six-year-old startup’s cult status and $1.1 billion valuation stem from how easily Airtable users can work with data to unlock insights, foster collaboration, and generate reports. In February 2018, the company introduced Blocks, a feature that provides noncoders a palette of options to create sophisticated custom applications for enhanced workflow. “Software as a medium is the next frontier of technology,” says cofounder Howie Liu. Air-table’s ease of use makes other cloud software, like Google Sheets, look stale—and it’s what has more than 90,000 businesses, from startups to huge enterprises, moving the beating heart of their companies onto Liu’s platform.…

Subscription wine club Winc became one of the top-50 wineries in the U.S. last year by flipping the typical business model on its head. While traditional vintners make a wine and then market it, Winc creates bottles based on more than 5 million customer ratings from its 75% millennial subscriber base. “Our winemaking team has done an incredible job of taking those signals and sourcing the grapes,” says cofounder Brian Smith, whose company produced roughly 100 labels and shipped an estimated 300,000 cases in 2018. For the second summer in a row, the company sold out of its Summer Water Societé—a three-month program that delivers a case of the $18-a-bottle Summer Water Rosé to subscribers in June, July, and August—and racked up a 1,000-person waiting list. Sales of the label…

Apple Music is gaining a foothold in India, and Spotify plans to enter the market in 2019, but “to achieve scale in India you need local advantage,” says JioSaavn CEO Rishi Malhotra. The music-streaming company, which was formed in October 2018 when streaming startup Saavn merged with telco giant Reliance’s Jio-Music service, offers more than 40 million tracks in 15 regional languages for 38 million monthly active users. It’s now wooing the telco’s 272 million high-speed mobile customers. Part of the pitch: JioSaavn offers highly flexible plans—users can choose from various tiers and sign up for a month or a year. Inspired by Netflix, the company also creates original content with independent artists via its own music label, which it promotes on the platform. Already, the company has had several…

Finance 1. Square For beautifying the devices we use to pay 2. Acorns For incentivizing us to save—and helping our storehouses grow 3.Remitly For helping immigrant families send money home in more flexible ways and in greater sums 4. Guideline For crafting an affordable 401(k) plan for a business of any size 5. Marcus by Goldman Sachs For bringing clarity to consumer financial planning via aI 6. Qwil For getting freelancers their money with interest-free cash advances 7. Fifth Wall Ventures For leading the property tech movement 8. Wunder Capital For financing small businesses going solar 9. RaiseMe For guiding community-college students to four-year schools 10. Bumped For letting customers invest in the businesses they love—each time they patronize them Food 1. Sweetgreen For planting novel approaches into every aspect…

indigo ag develops crops capable of surviving climate change. The company finds plants thriving where they shouldn’t, then tests them for unique microbes that the company can use in natural seed coatings to cultivate additional hardy specimens. in 2018, indigo’s resilient corn provided over 10% more yield per acre than traditional seed. The company’s wheat yields improved around 13%, with gains in rice, soybeans, and cotton as well. Farmers in five countries have planted more than a million acres of indigo-enhanced seed, embracing what cofounder and chief innovation officer Geoffrey von Maltzahn calls “probiotic” agriculture. indigo projects more than $1 billion in revenue this year…

An estimated 15% of all clothes and shoes churned out daily in the $3 trillion global fashion industry go unsold and are dumped in landfills or—worse—incinerated. “Fashion is driven by guesswork months before something is sold in a store,” says Hal Watts, cofounder and CEO of London-based software company Unmade, which combats overproduction by enabling clothing brands to offer shoppers customizable items that are unlikely to sit on shelves. Unmade’s technology tracks everything from the unique design of a product to where it will be shipped, and aggregates orders to determine the optimal production schedule. These capabilities allow fashion brands to bring down the price of on-demand manufacturing substantially. (It still costs roughly 20% more than traditional manufacturing, but brands save further by eliminating waste and reducing warehousing costs.)…

While Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk brag about their enormous rockets, capable of carrying heavy payloads into space, L.A.-based Rocket Lab has embraced a different strategy. Its 56-foot Electron rocket can carry only about 500 pounds, but it can reach space for just $5.7 million per launch (SpaceX, by contrast, spends $62 million to $90 million per trip), making putting satellites into orbit a possibility for companies both small and large. Rocket Lab had its first successful launch in January 2018, followed by two more that year. “We’re backlogged for the next year and a half,” says CEO Peter Beck, who has 12 more planned for 2019, along with a new launch site in Virginia. His clients include NASA (which popped some miniature CubeSats aboard) and imaging companies such as…

The German sportswear giant continued working with environmental group Parley for the Oceans, which intercepts plastic waste at the shoreline before it enters the sea, to create its spring 2019 Outdoor footwear line. Adidas then recycled the material for the knitted uppers of its sneakers. Zero-dye technology contributed to the monochrome design, which requires fewer chemicals and less energy and water to produce. (Price starting at $65) STAFF PICK Dolby Dimension Headphones ($ 599, dolby.com) For the first time, Dolby, whose technology has powered countless sound systems, has released a consumer product of its own design. The headphones deliver a 3-D-like sound quality. Their industrial design is slick and comfortable, with soft surfaces rather than hard plastics, and the touch controls work well. The headphones use noise-cancellation technology, but Dolby…

While working on a PhD in astrophysics, Chris Moody used supercomputers to simulate how galaxies crash into each other. For his first nonacademic job, he joined Square as a data scientist in 2013. About a year later, he started talking with some data-scientist friends who were employed at a startup called Stitch Fix, an upstart e-commerce service that delivered boxes of women’s fashion, known as “Fixes,” using a mix of algorithmic and human curation. ¶ Moody was mystified. “What on earth are you guys doing at a clothing company?” he recalls asking, admitting that his sartorial taste at the time hewed to “what costs less than ramen?” Their response, though, sent his brain firing. How do you mail customers clothes they’ll love, and that fit them perfectly, without the client…

It’s edible, tasteless, and can double (or triple) the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. Following six years of R&D, last May, Apeel Sciences debuted its Edipeel plantbased coating on avocados at more than 250 grocery chains, including Kroger and Costco. The technology, which slows water loss and oxidation, has already led to savings: Midwest grocer Harps reduced its avocado waste by 60%. Up next are strawberries, citrus, asparagus, and other produce-aisle mainstays. “We had worked under the hypothesis that reducing food waste in stores would be good for business and the environment,” says Apeel CEO James Rogers. “This year we were able to prove it.”…

One of the buzziest food products of 2018? a milk alternative made of pulverized oats. Founded in 1994, Swedish company Oatly was the first manufacturer to commercialize oat milk, but it was only after launching in the U.S. in 2016 that the product became a sensation, at one point last year selling for $200 per case online. CEO Toni Petersson set out to make Oatly a cult product in the States by tapping about 10 high-end coffee shops in major cities to be its exclusive retailers. “coffee shops influence other coffee shops,” he says. after baristas were impressed by the milk alternative’s neutral flavor and ability to foam, demand quickly exploded: 2,500 coffee shops and 1,500 grocery stores now carry Oatly, including Whole Foods and Wegmans, where its cartoonish, witty…

What do Kith, Ford, and NFL running back Marshawn Lynch’s beast mode boutique have in common? they’re among the more than 600,000 merchants that rely on Shopify’s e-commerce tools to sell products. In 2018, Shopify introduced one-click ordering—using any payment method—as well as chat-based commerce and AR tools to showcase large items like furniture. “We’re building a retail operating system,” says COO Harley Finkelstein. Shopify enabled $10 billion in sales in the third quarter of 2018, a 55% year-over-year increase, and its annual revenue is expected to top $1 billion.…

Video-game development company Unity technologies is known for software that lets developers build 3-D animations, in real time, at a fraction of traditional costs. (Users pay Unity a flat subscription fee rather than a percentage of game revenues.) in 2018, the company expanded its 3-D developer tool kit to a number of new industries, including architecture, film, and automotive. Lexus, for example, replaced its clay-modeling process with Unity to render the LC 500 sedan, while the visual-effects technicians behind the film Ready Player One and the Darren Aronofsky–produced Spheres used Unity to view virtual environments during production, obviating the need for costly adjustments in postproduction. In November, Unity won its first engineering Emmy, for Baymax Dreams, a series of animated shorts featuring the blimpy robot star of Disney’s Big Hero 6.…

There’s a good chance that your favorite bop from 2018 came from a Universal Music Group artist: Drake’s Scorpion was the top album of the year on Apple Music, Ariana Grande was Spotify’s most-streamed female artist, and Taylor Swift’s Reputation ranked No. 1 on Billboard’s year-end album chart. Amid the music industry’s digital transformation, Universal is redefining what a modern label should look like. Its recent landmark deal with Taylor Swift promises profits to artists should Universal sell its reported 4% stake in Spotify, and the company has set up outposts in countries such as Nigeria and China, signing and introducing consumers to new artists like Vanessa Mdee, Kris Wu, and the K-pop girl-group sensation BlackPink, which will be featured at Coachella this year. Universal also inked a new first-look…

You’ve probably eaten something today that was shipped by lineage logistics. about 90% of the food Americans consume requires refrigeration at some point during transport, and lineage provides that service for some 3,000 customers, including food giants Walmart, tyson, and McDonald’s. But in doing so, the company expends as much energy each year as 50,000 households. When Greg Lehmkuhl took over as CEO in 2015, he challenged his team to “dramatically change the amount of energy that’s consumed in a temperature-controlled supply chain.” Last year in particular, lineage’s mathematicians, physicists, and engineers made great strides in using data science to optimize operations. in July, the company secured its first patent, for an algorithm that uses lidar scans of warehouses to determine the most space-efficient way to store pallets. this helped…

Shan-Lyn Ma and Nobu Nakaguchi, both Gilt Groupe alumni, had seen firsthand the things that can derail an e-commerce company, such as excessive inventory and a cumbersome returns process. “We kept those in mind when we started Zola,” says Ma. More than 500,000 couples have since used the five-year-old service to create wedding websites, guest lists, and registries of products from more than 600 brands. Zola ships these items directly from the manufacturer, mitigating inventory. To minimize returns, it allows couples to choose when their gifts will be delivered, so they can exchange items virtually (through the website) before the presents even arrive. Last October, the company expanded to take on the $72 billion wedding-planning industry by introducing Real Weddings, a service in beta testing in 17 U.S. cities that…

Jumio is the service that allows you to upload a photo ID and snap a selfie to verify your identity for a bank, WeWork, or Airbnb account instantly. In 2018, the company launched a new AI lab, where researchers train algorithms to identify the fraud risk of an ID and automatically direct those that warrant further scrutiny to human reviewers. This mix of AI and human eyeballs cuts processing time from days to minutes. “The fraudsters always get smarter, and we’re always ahead of them,” says CEO Stephen Stuut. The company reported a 50% increase in enterprise customers and a 56% revenue increase in 2018, verifying 60 million identities.…

Direct-to-consumer skincare and cosmetic brand Beauty-counter refuses to use more than 1,500 legal but questionable chemicals in its products, but for founder and cEO Gregg Ren-frew, there’s another number that’s even more important: 40,000. That’s how many remote salespeople help promote the company’s expanding line of clean-beauty products, such as its new biodegradable makeup-remover wipes. These Beauty-counter “consultants” are also instrumental in lobbying at the state and federal level for tighter regulation of the $86 billion beauty and personal-care industry. The Santa Monica, california–based company helped lead successful efforts this past year to ban sunscreens in hawaii that are harmful to coral reefs and to require professional salon products used in california to list all of their ingredients. renfrew and 100 members of her sales force also met with lawmakers…

Brazilians have traditionally been able to bank only with a handful of large institutions that charge some of the highest lending rates globally. Four-year-old Nubank, now the largest digital bank outside of Asia, with 5 million users, offers a compelling alternative with its low-fee credit cards and payment accounts. Last year, it began offering direct deposit for users’ paychecks and debuted debit and ATM withdrawal features—enhancements that further what CEO David Vélez describes as Nubank’s mission: “Helping people find a way out of Brazil’s current banking system.”…

With 50% of its population under the age of 19, Africa will be home to the world’s largest workforce by 2035: a billion-plus people who will transform the continent. Statistics like these inspired Ghanaian entrepreneur Fred Swaniker, who opened the African Leadership Academy high school in Johannesburg, in 2008, to turn his attention to higher education. He founded his first African Leadership University (ALU) in Mauritius in 2015, and, two years later, opened a second undergraduate campus in Kigali, Rwanda. The three- to four-year-long programs ask students to pursue real-world missions (rather than academic majors), and bring tuition down to as low as $4,000 per year, per student, by embracing online and peer-to-peer learning. They also offer an innovative financing model: free tuition in exchange for 10% of postgraduation earnings…

Middle East 1. Sight Diagnostics For accurately diagnosing illnesses from a few drops of blood 2. Vayyar For making low-cost, 3-D-imaging technology to improve health and safety 3. Qatar airways For designing a private-jet experience for business-class customers 4. Innoviz Technologies For helping autonomous cars see their surroundings 5. Careem For treating ride-sharing as a local enterprise 6. The modist For bringing modest fashion to the masses 7. Fetchr For delivering packages to locations where the post office can’t 8. Jamalon For giving the world more access to arabic books 9. Anghami For providing a digital music community for people who can’t access concert venues 10. Econcrete For pouring concrete that stimulates biodiversity, reducing the ecological footprint of coastal projects Music 1. Universal music Group For embracing disruption and dominating…

The movie Eighth Grade, YouTube star bo burnham’s directorial debut about middle-school sturm und Drang in the age of social media, was a hit among critics at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. but it became a commercial success a few months later thanks to a shrewd campaign by the new york–based boutique film and TV studio A24. The studio, which has only 70 employees, rented out 50 theaters across the country where teens of any age could see the R-rated film for free—without getting their IDs checked at the door. This seeded a viral storm that helped the film go on to gross $13 million domestically—more than six times its production budget. The stunt is characteristic of A24, which is famous both for championing daring, auteur-driven fare and for its…

For nearly 50 years, Sesame Street has taught children at home. But what about kids who have no home? “Those impacted the most from displacement—young children—are receiving the least,” says Sherrie Westin, Sesame Workshop’s president of global impact. In late 2017, the organization received $100 million from the Mac Arthur Foundation and expanded its efforts with the International Rescue Committee. Sesame developed books, puzzles, flash cards, and videos in several Arabic and Kurdish dialects; trained IRC professionals work directly with refugee kids in camps and communities. Direct services have been available to children in Jordan and Lebanon since November 2018, and will reach Syria and Iraq in mid-2019. Sesame is also developing new Muppets for a locally produced Arabic-language TV show, which will debut in September 2019. In December, the…

When Facebook users learned last March that the social media giant had given their sensitive information to political-data firm Cambridge Analytica, Mozilla (parent company of the security-focused browser Firefox) reacted fast: Within eight hours, the product team had built a browser extension called the Facebook Container. The plug-in, now the most popular browser extension Mozilla has ever built (1.5 million downloads and 500,000 monthly active users), prevents Facebook from trailing its users around the internet. Firefox Monitor, a service Mozilla launched in September, uses your email address to determine whether your personal info has been compromised in a breach. By summer 2019, the Firefox browser will also block, by default, all cross-site third-party trackers, strengthening privacy without your having to do a thing (unlike Firefox’s biggest competitor, Google Chrome). “We…

When Robert Thompson opened the first Punch Bowl Social—an “eatertainment” concept that combines games and food—in his hometown of Denver, in 2012, he had one thing in mind: to encourage real, human interaction among millennials, inspired by the Victorian-era tradition of gathering around a bowl of punch. “This generation demands experiences, which also manifests itself in food and beverage,” he says. His company’s 15 U.S. outposts, from Atlanta to Portland, Oregon, include plenty of diversions: VR parlors, vintage arcade games, bowling alleys, and the food itself, thanks to menu staples created by James Beard Award–winning chef Hugh Acheson and now under the aegis of in-house chef Sheamus Feeley. Punch Bowl Social’s revenue grew by 31% last year, driven by food and beverage sales. As the company expands—it added four locations…

Sports 1. NBA For improving the game both on and off the court 2. Fanatics For manufacturing licensed gear at the speed of sports itself 3. Philadelphia Flyers For memeifying the sports mascot with the instantly iconic gritty 4. Levy For igniting the affordable ballpark food movement and endangering the $11 draft beer 5. Zwift For gamifying training for runners and cyclists with a social twist 6. Los Angeles Dodgers For winning the World Series… of sports tech investments 7. Nex Team For giving basketball players their own personal video-analysis team right on their phones 8. Copa90 For putting fans at the center of global soccer culture 9. Kitman Labs For employing analytics and science to make athletes healthier 10. MGM For betting big on the future of U.S. sports…