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These companies arent bigbut theyre bringing new ideas to some thorny challenges. Kids have been crafting with cardboard for decades, but Chompshop has found a way to make it safer and more fun. Online clothes shopping has long been a bit hit or miss, but Veesuals found a way to maximize the number of hits. And GoodMaps and Overture Maps have tackled longstanding navigation problems. ChompshopFor making kids cardboard crafts safer and more funCheap, abundant cardboard is great for kids art and science projects, but its often hard to trim with scissors. Chompshop has developed a kid-safe power tool specifically designed for this versatile material. While its called a ChompSaw and looks like a table saw, its based on a protected hole-punch mechanism that keeps childrens hands safe. After a successful Kickstarter campaign and Shark Tank appearance, the company has sold more than 17,000 ChompSaws since its October 2024 launch. GoodMapsFor helping people navigate indoors as easily as on the roadNavigating indoor spaces like airports and museums can be complicated, especially as GPS-style assistance is typically not available. GoodMaps developed an AI-powered system letting venue operators scan and map facilities using just an iPhone. A GoodMaps Studio application lets operators customize maps and guidance. The platform has been embraced by airports from London Heathrow to Dallas Fort Worth International, as well as institutions such as Ohio’s Armstrong Air & Space Museum. Overture MapsFor setting the standard for unifying messy map dataA collaborative open-data initiative founded by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom and embraced by other big names such as Esri, Tripadvisor, and Uber, Overture Maps built an identification system for more than 3 billion global locations thats as unique as the human fingerprint. Its Global Entity Reference System makes it clear that Toms Diner is (or isnt) the same location as Toms Restaurant, whichever app or dataset youre working with. GERS can also benefit governments tracking data like car accidents and serve autonomous cars needing clear navigational information. VeesualFor letting online shoppers get an accurate view before they buy clothesOnline clothes shopping is notoriously hit-or-miss. While some companies have developed virtual AI models, they can distort the look of garments and the body itself. Veesual created an alternative, physics-informed approach, displaying clothes as theyd actually appear on a range of models and letting customers see how theyll look on someone like them. The startup has worked with brands such as Eileen Fisher, Lululemon, and Adore Me, and it raised a $7.5 million seed round in 2024. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Companys Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.
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E-Commerce
Lets face it: The fact that AI is amazing is no longer all that … amazing. The technology is under ever-increasing pressure to prove its real-world value for consumers, businesses, and researchers in specific contexts. These honorees in the applied AI category are proving AIs worth for fashion advice, pharmaceutical advice, coding, and much more. Alta For bringing AI to personal stylingFor people who lack style expertise or time for outfit planning, the task of choosing what to wear can be a daily frustration. Alta built a personal AI stylist app that generates outfits based on users’ actual wardrobes, lifestyle, budget, weather, and upcoming eventswhether theyre dressing for a board meeting in Switzerland or a summer wedding in Napa. Users can upload their wardrobe or let the app automatically scrape their fashion buys from receipts and photos, then receive personalized suggestions they can visualize on customized avatars. The style agent learns each user’s unique style preferences, getting smarter with use. Alta raised $11 million from top-tier investors including Menlo Ventures, secured a partnership with the Council of Fashion Designers of America that gives CFDA members access to its AI platform, and partnered with tidiness guru Marie Kondo to offer premium closet organization services. Ambience Healthcare For freeing doctors from documentation drudgeryCaregivers spend countless hours every week filling out patient chartstime that could be spent on actual patient care. Ambience Healthcare has developed an AI platform that listens in on patientphysician conversations in the exam room via a phone app and automatically generates comprehensive medical notes. The AI then creates a draft summary of the notescomplete with suggested ICD-10 and CPT codesthat the caregiver can review, edit, and sign. The system integrates with major electronic health record systems such as Epic and Oracle Cerner. Cleveland Clinic is now implementing Ambients solution after doing a comprehensive head-to-head test of AI scribe solutions for healthcare, testing five leading solutions with hundreds of clinicians and across more than 80 medical specialties over six months. Bolt For bringing vibe coding to the browserBuilding web and mobile applications traditionally requires multiple development teams, technical infrastructure, and months of coding. Among the highest-profile entrants in the new category of vibe coding tools, Bolt changes app creation by letting users describe what they want to build in natural language then instantly generating code. The platform handles front-end and back-end development logistics as well as hosting without complex setups or cloud services. After launching with a single tweet in October 2024, Bolts business grew quickly, scaling from zero to $40 million annualized recurring revenue in just four months. The company secured $83.5 million in Series B funding at a $700 million valuation. Cradle For accelerating protein engineering with AITraditional protein engineering is slow, expensive, and unpredictable, hindering progress in pharmaceuticals, materials science, and biotechnology. Cradle harnesses generative AI to accelerate protein design by creating entirely new protein sequences tailored for specific functions. This distinguishes Cradle from DeepMinds AlphaFold, which predicts the structures of proteins. The platform reduces experimental iterations, improves success rates, and uncovers novel structures that were previously out of reach for developing therapeutics, sustainable materials, and industrial enzymes. In 2025, Cradle expanded to 21 customers, including Johnson & Johnson and Novo Nordisk, demonstrating real-world validation of its technology in high-stakes drug development. GitHubFor making AI coding collaborativeIn the age of AI coding assistants, developers are under pressure to ship code faster while maintaining quality, often forcing a choice between speed and control. Since becoming the first widely used coding assistant, GitHub Copilot has evolved beyond simple code suggestions into a tool for creating entire new software features and functions. But GitHub and its parent company, Microsoft, have taken a distinct approach to developing Copilot: Rather than pursuing full automation, GitHub designed Copilot to leave the human coder firmly in control. The assistant works like a good human teammate, GitHub says, showing its work and asking for review before anything ships. GitHub says Copilot’s user base quadrupled year over year in 2025 and now includes 15 million developers and more than 77,000 organizations. Google For applying secure open models to healthcareHealthcare AI developers often struggle to build medical applications because they cant access specialized models that handle sensitive data securely. Google’s MedGemma family offers the first open multi-modal models trained specifically for medical text and image comprehension, enabling developers to keep sensitive data within private environments while adapting models for specific use cases. The models range from 4 billion to 27 billion parameters, small enough to fine-tune and serve on a single GPU, with the 27B version featuring clinical reasoning capabilities useful for patient triage and differential diagnosis. MedGemma achieved over 150,000 downloads from more than 10,000 developers in its first month, with the community creating and sharing more than 100 fine-tuned versions on Hugging Face. Hebbia For extracting insights from financial document chaosWhile making critical risk assessments and investment decisions, financial services professionals often must rely on unstructured data contained within numerous documents. Hebbia custom-built a generative AI solution for finance that lets users more quickly capture insights from millions of diverse documents located all around the organization. An investment banker might use Hebbia to generate conclusions from a call transcript, or someone in private equity could use it to identify potential risk factors before signing an investment deal. Hebbia can also summarize external documents such as market reports and credit agreements. The platform’s versatility across multiple financial tasks helped Hebbia secure a $130 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Hebbia says it now serves 30% of all U.S. asset managers and has processed over 100 million documents, or 10 times more than its nearest competitors. Jigsaw For making sense of massive public conversationsGovernments and other organizations struggle to synthesize thousands of public comments on civic issues. Traditional analysis methods can take months to deliver results, leaving feedback loops open too long for meaningful action. Jigsaw, an incubator inside Google, used Googles Gemini AI model to create a toolkit called Sensemaker. It identifies key topics and themes from large-scale online conversations, allowing users to understand thousands of perspectives within minutes while preserving discussion richness. The technology surfaces patterns, areas of agreement and disagreement, and actionable insights from data that was previously impossible to process at scale. In its pilot with Bowling Green, Kentucky’s BG2050 intiativea project addressing the expected doubling of the citys population by 2050local leaders used Sensemaker to analyze a four-week online conversation, enabling them to draw insights from community input that would have otherwise remained buried in unstructured data. Pando For taming logistics chaos Global logistics has faced relentless disruption in recent years, from the RussiaUkraine war to sourcing upheavals caused by the Trump administrations tariffs. Pando recently added an AI agent called Pi to its platform for managing complexity and risk. The agent is powered by proprietary logistics language models and can automate operations such as requesting shipment from a carrier, invoice validation, and anomaly detection. The agent recommends actions, explains its logic, and executes tasks after confirmation. Within weeks of Pis launch, a number of Fortune 50 brands, including Meta, onboarded Pando, demonstrating the platform’s ability to handle the complexities of enterprise-scale logistics. Samsung Electronics AmericaFor making AI feel natural on mobile devicesSmartphone AI features can sometimes feel gimmicky or disconnected from real-life workflows, creating barriers and distractions rather than enhancing the user experience. The features not only have to be useful but they have to show up at the right times and right places in the UX. Samsung did it right with Galaxy AI, which it integrated directly into its smartphones Android operating system to provide context-aware, personalized experiences through multimodal AI agents that can interpret text, speech, images, and videos. Users can perform multistep actions across apps, using plain language to get directions, send messages, and update calendars simultaneously. The Galaxy S25 series implementation has earned widespread praise from tech reviewersToms Guide remarked, The S25 Ultra is packed with smarter AI features I wish the iPhone 16 Pro Max had. Sonar For ensuring AI-generated code meets enterprise standardsAI coding assistants have proved that they can accelerate software development, but as the tools have evolved to touch more and more parts of an organizations code, they also can introduce hard-to-detect flaws that show up as bugs later on. Sonars platform uses AI to scan software for quality problems then fixes them. Fixes are informed by the platforms deep experienceit analyzes more than 300 billion lines of code every day, the company says. The platform’s AI Code Assurance mode provides stricter quality gates for AI-generated code, while AI CodeFix generates contextual repair suggestions based on precise analysis findings rather than generic recommendations. Sonar says that 70% of developers rate its fix quality at 4 or 5 out of 5. Typeface For generating end-to-end marketing campaignsMarketers too often must choose between AI-generated content that’s generic or that is off-brand. Typeface created the first AI marketing platform that orchestrates the entire content process from brief to finished campaign. While the Typeface integrates with more than 30 AI models, the company trains custom models that maintain brand voice, tone, and visual identity. The platform’s Brand Hub is a searchable AI content repository that enforces compliance and governance guidelines. Spaces provides a visual workspace where marketers create personalized emails, ads, web pages, and videos without becoming prompt engineers. Typeface secured major enterprise deals with Fortune 100 companies, including Asics, in 2025. VermillioFor arming creators against deepfakesVermillio makes a new kind of IP protection platform that identifies the unauthorized use of a persons likeness or voice in synthetic or AI-generated audio and video. Traditional content protection systems can fail to detect AI-generated content derived from a face or voice because theyre better at detecting exact replicas of the original content. Vermillio’s TraceID technology assigns digital signatures to every fragment of intellectual property, creating “soft bindings” through digital hashes and fingerprints that arent easily removed by generative AI models. Vermillios platform tracks IP usage across images, text, audio, and video, ensuring proper attribution and compensation while detecting harmful deepfakes. Vermillio says it had more than 130,000 pieces of unauthorized AI-generated content taken down in Q4 2024 alone. In March 2025 the company closed a $16 million Series A round led by Sony Music Entertainment and including Disney and Warner Music Group. Warp For reimagining the terminal for the AI ageDevelopers have long preferred to control their machines via a command-line terminal because its more direct and precise. Unfortunately, the terminal, which was born in the 1970s, hasnt kept up with new developments in AI-powered coding assistants and agents. So Warp built a modern, AIpowered terminal for developers called an Agentic Development Environment (ADE). The environment maintains the command line’s power while adding support for natural-language-based AI coding assistance and the ability to manage multiple AI agents. The result is a platform where AI agents have more visibility into the code base so that they can detect potential problems and offer ways of fixing them. Warp says it has seen 90% year-over-year growth in its user base, with 600,000 active developers now using the platform, including 16,000 engineering teams. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Companys Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.
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E-Commerce
The space and telecom industries can look increasingly intertwined as satellite roamingtoday for messages, tomorrow for databecomes a standard feature. But while wireless services have the luxury of iterating as often as they want once they start signing up customers, space startups have to take things one launch at a time. Eascra BiotechFor making the International Space Station a pharmaceutical research labEascra has one of the most interesting worksites of any of this year’s honorees: the International Space Station, where astronauts conduct research on developing nanoparticles to treat cancer and other maladies. Growing these materials in microgravity yields more uniform particles that can store mRNA drugs at room temperaturenot the subzero conditions mRNA medication usually requires. Impulse SpaceFor bringing the space tug concept closer to commercial realityFounded by SpaceX veteran Tom Mueller, Impulse Space helps launch providers take their payloads farther with its Helios kick stagewhich can send a satellite from low Earth orbit to geostationary orbit in a dayand its smaller Mira space tug. The company has raised $300 million and has won contracts from NASA and the Space Force to develop its platforms further. MobileXFor leveraging AI to resell wireless service as cheaply as possibleMobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) can look alike, especially when so many of them are now properties of the big three wireless carriers. But MobileX, which resells Verizons network, stands out for extremely low rates, starting at $3.48 a month and maxing out at $24.88. Its secret weapon? The company applies AI to analyze patterns of use to match customers with the most affordable plan that fits. US MobileFor bringing choice and flexibility to the wireless resale marketUS Mobile has experienced a rocket-launch trajectory since its 2016 debutin 2025, it made its first appearance on Consumer Reports survey of subscribers at the top of that list. Unlike most MVNOs, it resells each of the big three wireless carriersunder cutesy names (Dark Star means AT&T, Light Speed T-Mobile, Warp Verizon). It lets subscribers choose among the three on the fly with its Teleport feature, tapping the best coverage for their everyday whereabouts. VardaFor making pharmaceutical materials in spaceManufacturing in microgravity has been a part of humanitys imagined off-world future for decades, but Varda has finally done it by building its own uncrewed satellite and reentry capsule. That allows life-sciences customers to generate crystals for pharmaceutical uses that are more uniform than what gravity would allow. Following successful landings by Vardas capsule, in June the company launched its first mission built on an in-house satellite bus; a month later, it announced a $187 million fundraising round. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Companys Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.
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E-Commerce
After federal funding for renewables evaporated this year, the future path of the energy sector has been unclear. But even in uncertain times, companies are advancing the technology needed to push for a clean-energy transitionwhile also accommodating for a new grid that needs to keep up with the huge power demands of the wave of data centers coming online. From new battery tech to all-day solar power to better ways to track emissions and more, these innovations can help see the sector through this precarious period. ExowattFor generating solar power even when the sun isnt shiningExowatts P3 unit is a power plant in a 40-foot-long shipping container. The unit uses solar energy to heat a thermal batteryessentially a very hot piece of claythat can then provide consistent power from solar even at night. The modular design will allow a series of P3 units to be quickly deployed to power new data centers without overwhelming the existing grid and needs no rare earth materials like lithium to operate. The company has raised $70 million so far from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Open AIs CEO Sam Altman. General MotorsFor rolling out a new kind of batteryLithium batteries may only have one element in the name, but they also require quite a bit of nickel and cobalt, two rare earth elements that have expensive (and sometimes ethically fraught) supply chains. Researchers at General Motors say they have recently made a breakthrough with a new kind of lithium-manganese rich (LMR) battery, which uses cheap and abundant manganese. Besides solving supply chain and cost issues, the automakers innovation has also addressed old issues with LMRs losing charge quickly. The company is planning to roll out its new formulation batteries by 2028, and it says they could boost the range of its EVs to 400 miles per charge. GreenlaneFor building the electric truck charging infrastructure networkAs the electrification wave comes for freight trucking fleets, the truck stop must also evolve, providing fast charging for large vehicles on highways around the country. Greenlane, a company founded with backing from Daimler Truck North America and BlackRocks climate fund, aims for widespread deployment of its Greenlane High-Speed Charging System, with 12 pull-through lane 400 kW chargers. The company opened its flagship charging station on I-15 Southern California in April 2025 and plans to expand to electrify the entire highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. PersefoniFor powering climate reporting, with some help from AIAs governments around the world demand more climate disclosure from companies, the time and money it takes to keep track of all the data can be daunting, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. Climate accounting software company Persefonis newest Pro offering helps those companies collect and report that dataeven Scope 3 emissions, involving emissions from suppliers and customers, which are notoriously hard to track. To solve the problem, the softwares Scope 3 Data Exchange lets companies request emissions data directly from their suppliers. It also uses generative AI to help generate reports and ensure compliance with major emissions standards around the world. In its first year available, the software amassed more than 6,000 users. X, the Moonshot FactoryFor building the first map of the entire gridThere is currently no working map of the worlds electric grid. Tapestry, a project from Googles X, the Moonshot Factory, is working to change that. The effortnow active in the U.S., U.K., Chile, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia, is combining AI-powered inspection and advanced simulation tools to help operators plan, maintain, and scale the grid. Its two products use machine learning to help quickly inspect grids and solve problems and to plan for future grid expansion. This year, the company began partnering with Chinese operators. Its also helping PJMthe largest grid operator in North Americamodel ways to bring renewable sources online faster. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Companys Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.
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E-Commerce
Our honorees in the new tech visionaries category are executives who applied new thinking to pressing problems. One is working to take cellular broadband places its never gone before. Another aims to make the tech industry less dependent on the risky business of mining rare earth materials. And the third is applying AI to the thorny challenge of defending against ever-smarter missiles and drones. Abel Avellan, CEO, AST SpaceMobileFor sending cellular broadband to spaceFounded in 2017 by chairman and CEO Abel Avellan, AST SpaceMobile has launched six of its BlueBird satellites into low Earth orbit, with plans to have 60 more in orbit by the end of 2026. The goal is to deliver the worlds first satellite-based cellular 4G/5G broadband to unmodified smartphones, soaring past the technological limitations that have kept reliable high-speed cellular delivered through other means from reaching nearly half the worlds population. Under Avellans leadership, the company has signed more than 50 wireless providers as strategic partners and raised $2 billion-plus from investors such as AT&T, Google, Rakuten, Verizon, and Vodafone. Ahmad Ghahreman, Cyclic MaterialsFor giving rare earth materials a new lease on lifeRare earth materials such as neodymium and dysprosium are critical to everything from consumer electronics to data centers to energy production. But mining them is saddled with issues relating to geopolitics (China dominates the market), human rights, and climate change. Cyclic Materials CEO and cofounder Ahmad Ghahreman oversaw the invention of CC360, a process that recycles these materials99% of which currently go to landfillfrom disk drives. Among those working to help the company commercialize its technology are Amazon, BMW, Hitachi, and Microsoft, all of which participated in its $55 million Series B funding round. Amy Gilliland, General Dynamics Information TechnologyFor using AI to defend against missiles and dronesAn $8.5 billion unit of defense giant General Dynamics, GDIT is led by president Amy Gilliland. The company worked with Amazon Web Services to develop an AI platform for the U.S. Department of Defense called Defense Operations Grid-Mesh Accelerator, or DOGMA. It helps protect against attacks by highly maneuverable missiles and drones by ingesting data from a network of sensors, analyzing it, and notifying the right operators on the groundall swiftly enough to evade any attempts to jam communications systems. During tests at the DoDs Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX) event in 2024, DOGMA reduced the time necessary to make decisions from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. The companies and individuals behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Companys Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2025. Read more about the winners across all categories and the methodology behind the selection process.
Category:
E-Commerce
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