Explore the full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 540 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 54 categories, including artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, and more.
In the digital age, every company has data—often in such overwhelming quantities that it can be tough to figure out what to do with it all. Properly applied, data science turns it from an undifferentiated mass of information into intelligence. These companies are harnessing its power to tackle challenges in everything from supply chain management to media and entertainment.
Healthcare is a particularly fertile field for data science innovations such as Sophia Genetics‘s machine learning models, which allows partners such as AstraZeneca and Memorial Sloan Kettering to identify cancer early and improve patient outcomes. Then there’s Nference’s nSights platform, which leverages more than a billion lab results to give Mayo Clinic and other researchers new insights in areas such as oncology, cardiology, and COVID-19 prevention.
Organizations working to overcome deep-seated societal problems can turn to data science to gain critical knowledge about the issues at play. Aclima, for example, collects hyper-targeted data on air quality, confirming that poorer neighborhoods suffer from more smog than affluent ones—a first step toward focused solutions. Censia provides an AI-based hiring platform based on skills, not conventional résumé information, giving a more diverse talent pool better access to jobs that match their strengths. And Robust Intelligence helps companies spot flaws in machine language models as early as possible, so they can be used to overcome real-world biases rather than reinforce them.
Not every application of data science involves such weighty matters. Spotify’s hugely popular, much-imitated Wrapped summarizes nearly half a billion users’ listening habits in increasingly inventive ways that beg to be shared. For music fans, Wrapped is pure fun—but it’s also the product of new ways of managing big data.
1. ROBUST INTELLIGENCE
For making sure machine learning models are solid from the start
As machine learning models transform business processes across an array of industries—from finance to medicine to travel—it’s essential to test them for flaws which, if left unchecked, could have catastrophic consequences. Robust Intelligence’s platform tests ML models from conception to deployment, analyzing data in real time to spot biases that make AI unfair, security holes that leave it open to hackers, and other problem areas. The company added the ability to adopt its ML integrity solutions via Amazon Web Services in July 2022, allowing customers with less specialized needs to have a solution for testing their ML operations. The company began working with the U.S. Air Force in March to protect its AI systems. It also signed on Deloitte, Mastercard, and Medtronic as customers in 2022.
Read more about Robust Intelligence, honored as No. 48 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023.
2. SPOTIFY
For creating a yearly global ritual based on our music-listening habits
Spotify started compiling its year in review in 2013, and it officially became Wrapped in 2016. Since then, Wrapped has grown into a highly anticipated global moment of virality by compiling the music and podcast listening stats from each of its 489 million monthly active users (as of December 31, 2022) for a personalized year in audio. In 2022, the visual, highly sharable experience—Wrapped is one of the world’s most shared marketing campaigns—added Audio Day, which let users see how their musical mood evolved from morning to night, and most notably, slotted users into one of 16 “listening personalities,” such as “early adopter” and “replayer.” For the first time the company let artists (and podcasters) offer their biggest fans the opportunity to buy merch. Spotify claims this led to its biggest-ever week in sales, though it did not reveal hard numbers.
With Wrapped having become an annual event during the holiday season, Spotify is now exploring opportunities to leverage and coalesce more data by developing other shareable moments throughout the year. In June 2022 it launched Supergrouper, which gave users the ability to create supergroups of their favorite artists. In August, Spotify offered an in-app experience that invited listeners to pick their top five Kendrick Lamar projects.
3. EVERSTREAM ANALYTICS
For showing companies how to make their supply chains more resilient
Every supply chain consists of multiple tiers—and it can be difficult for any organization to gain full visibility into those that lay beyond tier one, its direct suppliers. Everstream Analytics uses 128 billion daily points of public and nonpublic data to give its clients, which include AB InBev, Bayer, Unilever, and Whirlpool, a full understanding of every layer of their supply chains and their impact on such things as the company’s inventory, ESG goals, and reputation. In March 2022, Everstream launched Discover, which leverages all those data points to map the entirety of a company’s supply chain, identifying bottlenecks and helping companies comply with local and international laws. In June 2022, the United States started to enforce the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and the European Parliament called for an import ban on goods made with forced labor. Everstream Discover’s tools assist companies in ensuring that their supply chains are free of goods made with forced and child labor.
4. SOPHIA GENETICS
For weaving health data from varied sources into one powerful platform
Sophia Genetics’s machine learning product, known as Sophia-DDM, processes medical data from multiple sources—such as patient history, genomic testing analysis, and radiomic data—to provide insights that go beyond more siloed approaches to analysis. In February 2022, the company introduced a new deep-learning tool for identifying cancer through DNA analysis. It has already been rolled out in 10 countries, including a European deployment in partnership with AstraZeneca. In September 2022, the company teamed with institutes such as Memorial Sloan Kettering and Boundless Bio to apply its algorithms to applications such as tumor analysis, therapeutics development, DNA-based cancer detection, and patient outcome prediction. Sophia Genetics, which went public in July 2021, generated $34.2 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2022, a 15.8% increase over the same time period a year earlier.
5. ACLIMA
For collecting pollution data, block by block
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The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that 99% of the global population breathes air that contains a level of pollution that exceeds its guidelines. Aclima, which is now live in 150 cities across 15 states, builds both stationary and roving sensors to measure air quality at the specificity of a single city block. The company initiated a block-by-block analysis of 5,000 square miles in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in May 2022, it reported on the data it amassed. Aclima revealed that people living in poverty are exposed to 30% more particulates that lead to smog (and subsequent health problems) than those who live above the poverty line; in communities of color, it’s as much as 55% more pollutants than predominantly white neighborhoods. Although the top-line data is not necessarily a surprise, the block-specific intelligence allows for targeted interventions by municipal governments, such as encouraging individual or community gardens in affected areas.
In July 2022, Aclima partnered with the state of New York to do mobile monitoring of air quality and greenhouse gas emissions in communities most burdened by environmental pollution. The state intends to use Aclima’s data to help it fulfill its climate effects mitigation commitments in its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
6. CENSIA
For removing biases from the data companies use to make hiring decisions
Censia is a five-year-old executive search firm; it’s proprietary Talent Intelligence tool is an AI-powered, data-driven technology that helps companies find job candidates with the necessary skills—faster and without bias. In 2022, the platform bolstered its data set by adding company and industry information. That helps identify strong prospects regardless of their current title and employer, opening up opportunities for diverse candidates, those from smaller organizations, and ones in adjacent industries who might otherwise be overlooked. It also began offering its service via API in March 2022, allowing clients to incorporate candidate diversity and diversity by job title and skills into their hiring solutions as they see fit. As a result, bookings were up almost sixfold, to $11.5 million.
7. DSTILLERY
For targeting ad campaigns so they’re both privacy-minded and effective
New regulations and limitations on browser cookies have compelled marketers to seek new privacy-minded methods of targeting ad campaigns. Introduced in May 2022, Dstillery’s ID-free Custom AI helps brands reach audiences using data derived from the company’s Map of the Internet, a 128-dimension anonymized survey of online behavior. The company says that results are comparable to conventional cookie-based technologies, allowing its customers to ready themselves for the less intrusive future of digital marketing without sacrificing their goals. Dstillery converted dozens of clients to ID-free, with pharma brands in particular being interested in how they could use such context clues as when a user visited and from which market to discern patterns that would let them connect their behavior with a health condition. In September 2022, Dstillery partnered with the healthcare analytics company PurpleLab to offer these customers custom patient-targeting tools.
8. VIRTUALITICS
For turning data relationships into vivid 3D visuals
Virtualitics helps organizations understand their data by applying AI to create rich 3D visualizations that can even be experienced in VR. In March 2022, it released its Virtualitics AI Platform that makes its tools available in any web browser. That same month, the Institute for Systems Biology embraced Virtualitics to help 150 researchers better understand the data required to develop treatments for long COVID. Customers from Maersk to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency use its Intelligent Exploration platform to pinpoint relationships, drivers, and outliers in ways that go well past the domain of conventional business intelligence software.
9. NFERENCE
For giving health professionals new insights into medical records
Launched in September 2022, Nference’s nSights allows academic medical centers such as Mayo Clinic to analyze electronic medical record (EMR) data while preserving patient privacy. The platform includes over 20 years of information, including more than 1.3 billion lab results—an invaluable resource for studies in oncology, cardiology, and other research areas. (Nference intends to add genomics data next.) In 2022, more than 40 peer-reviewed studies incorporated nSights data, investigating topics such as the lasting efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. Another study on coronavirus viral sequences led to a new research collaboration with the National Institutes of Health.
10. VAST DATA
For helping organizations reap the benefit of flash storage
For running AI algorithms in data centers, there’s no faster, more flexible storage technology than flash memory. But flash is pricey compared to hard disks. Enter Vast Data’s Universal Storage architecture, which lets everyone from NASA to Verizon to Boston Children’s Hospital take advantage of flash memory’s benefits in a cost-effective way, shaving hours off critical computing jobs. In March 2022, the company partnered with Nvidia to unveil Ceres, a next-generation storage platform for use in ultrapowerful AI superclusters. Ceres improves Universal Storage’s performance by 2x yet commands half the power requirements.
Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90846952/most-innovative-companies-data-science-2023