Every year, Fast Company puts together a list of what it views as the world’s most innovative companies, poring over every space to find wide representation. Their list includes an overall top 50, as well as individual top ten lists for a long list of individual sectors. These lists range from some of the biggest names in business like McDonalds and Microsoft, down to small startups which have yet to really breakthrough in mainstream conversation. This year’s list, unsurprisingly given how important our industries are to the business world at large, includes a number of companies who fall within the intersection of the geospatial and built worlds. Below are nine innovative geospatial tech companies which land in this categorization, none of which made the overall top 50 but all were within top tens in a variety of different groupings put together by Fast Company.
From an article in Geo Week News by Matt Collins.
Unity, 1st in Augmented and Virtual Reality
Just before the start of 2023, Geo Week News put together our list of trends we were watching for across our industries for the coming year, one of which was the continued leveraging of gaming engines for better 3D visualizations. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Unity is not only on this list of innovative companies, but at the very top in the AR/VR category. Fast Company highlights Unity’s work with digital twins, pointing out how fruitful these tools can be for large spaces like airports. As the industrial metaverse becomes something closer to reality, companies like Unity will be at the forefront of providing the most valuable visualizations for enterprise customers.
GHGSat, 2nd in North America
Fast Company didn’t only break out companies by sector, but also had a handful of lists looking at specific parts of the world and companies standing out in those locations. For North America, GHGSat, based in Montreal, was second only to Ramp, a financial company. GHGSat is, as the name suggests, a satellite company whose hardware is used for Earth observation. Specifically, the company monitors greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, coming from industrial sites. The company made headlines last fall, capturing the first high-resolution images of the Nord Stream 3 pipeline leak, and they won a contract with NASA last October.
Luminar, 3rd in Transportation
Although we know there are a plethora of use cases for lidar technology, in the general public the tools are still largely associated with the emerging autonomous vehicle market. Most manufacturers are leaning on lidar for navigation purposes, and Luminar is putting themselves near or at the top of the list of lidar providers. The company had a big 2022, including deals to include its technology in upcoming releases from Polestar and Volvo.
For the complete article on innovative geospatial tech companies CLICK HERE.
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