The most innovative design companies of 2026

Following the rise of modern AI , design will never be the same . It’s no wonder that a majority of our 2026 Most Innovative Companies in design stood out by either leveraging or enabling the technology in new ways. That includes the Chinese company Unitree ’s backflipping humanoid robots, and BioRender’ s statistics-crunching visualization software that’s quickly become the de facto tool behind published research. Canva is using AI to smash several different pieces of software into a unified interface, while the digital product agency consultancy Metalab helped build the way we use AI products like Midjourney. Even BYD’s hair-flattening YangWang U9 Xtreme super car insists on flexing its AI prowess as it scans the road to literally leap over potholes. But on the other end of the spectrum, we’re acknowledging the countertrend of human experience. Netflix and Starbucks both make an appearance on our list for reinvesting in unique physical retail, while Nike has teased a wonderment of new technologies to keep people moving. Design will all get a lot messier in the age of AI before we see much clarity. In the meantime, grab yourself a piping hot cup of coffee in a plush seat while AI designs your next company’s pitch deck. 1. BYD For adapting EV designs to fit every market around the world. The world’s largest EV manufacturer, BYD , is demonstrating an aggressive, research-led approach to challenge the status quo of car design, and drive electrification across the world. The company has invested more than $13 billion in R&D over the past seven quarters, and it continues to demonstrate the fruits of investing in future technologies that improve the experience of its electric cars. In 2025, BYD debuted a 1,000kW charging standard that can fuel a car for 250 miles of range in just 5 minutes—the fastest charging standard on the market. And it’s since beaten that record . It debuted a 1,287 horsepower supercar called the YangWang U9 Xtreme that can read the road to leap over potholes. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, BYD has been focused on expanding its offerings for exports to other countries (no doubt, to claim market share outside of China’s fiercely competitive EV market). Rather than design one car for the world, it’s adapting EVs to fit into different driving cultures. So far, the plan seems to be working. Its exports grew 150% in 2025. Read more about BYD , honored as No. 16 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026 . 2. Starbucks For bringing hospitality back to the hospitality industry As Starbucks stared down the barrel of six straight quarters where it was losing revenue, its new CEO Brian Niccol declared a daring new, old strategy: investing in its store design. Dubbed Back to Starbucks, the company is currently “uplifting” over a thousand of its stores to feel like warmer environments. It’s full of soft touches that will soon include a comfortable new chair and ceramic cup . Not so visibly, Starbucks is also adjusting the nitty gritty of how it handles its queue of digital orders. And it’s training baristas to engage more with customers. While the changes have been bumpy—and not without union pushback—Starbucks is amidst one of the most aggressive redesigns in business history. Since implementing updates, it finally broke a two-year sales slump in the U.S. Same store sales are up 4% domestically and globally as of Q1 2026, and it’s reduced service times to four minutes or less in 80% of its cafes. It looks like Niccol’s big plan might get people back to Starbucks, after all. Read more about Starbucks , honored as No. 18 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026 . 3. Day Job For branding the brands that define the zeitgeist Behind some of 2025’s most viral products is the brand and digital design work of one, L.A.-based studio, Day Job . Day Job doesn’t just imagine a name or logo, it generates several different visual worlds. Each offers a different path for a company go grow into. With David bars —a low carb protein bar that’s captured the macronutrient zeitgeist—Day Job imagined the brand with all sorts of subtle allusions. There’s the strangely familiar name (David, like the marble sculpture by Michelangelo. But also maybe any other David you know). The straightforward serifed font (presented with the logical simplicity of a classic Apple ad). And the gold foil wrapper (tacitly channeling the golden ticket of a Wonka Bar). It all amalgamated into protein supplement history. Day Job also imagined the rapid-fire video podcast TBPN with the energy of a Formula One event—featuring a race car logo dump complete with reimagined retro references, like Paul Rand’s classic logo for IBM. In each case, Day Job wants the brand to capture the sensation of a product, to invent another world you can’t help but buy into. Read more about Day Job , No. 26 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026 . 4. Unitree Robotics For turning humanoid robots from a novelty into a mainstream product Unitree could be the first company to make humanoid robots a true mainstream consumer product. A lot of the excitement is due to how effectively Unitree has taken over the mindshare of the internet. It’s offered an unending feed of seemingly impossible demonstrations of its hyper dexterous humanoid robots—which can run, flip, and even leap into the air to jump-kick a watermelon into pulp. But it’s also launched four different humanoid robots in the last two years, driving their price down from $90,000 a unit to a consumer-friendly $4,900 in the process. Its R1 Air is the cheapest walking humanoid robot in the world, already priced at a fourth of the lowest estimated price for Tesla’s Optimus robot. Standing 4 foot 2 inches tall and controlled with a smartphone, the R1 Air can’t autonomously clean your home yet, but it has the ability to walk on its hands with 26 joints and AI vision. Furthermore, the company has launched the first robot “app library” to support these products—which allows owners to download new moves directly onto its robots, ranging from The Twist to some of Bruce Lee’s kung fu. It’s all enough to position Unitree’s upcoming IPO as one of the most anticipated across China this year. Read more about Unitree Robotics , No. 39 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2026 . 5. Canva For consolidating design into a single workflow There is no worse work than redoing work. To create something to have to recreate it in a slightly different way—hopping from one app to another to do so. And that’s been a large part of a graphic designer or marketer’s task since the rise of digital design. In 2025, Canva launched its biggest redesign in its 13-year history to address this pain point. In an update dubbed the Visual Suite 2.0, Canva consolidated its many disparate design templates—from Instagram posts to t-shirt slogans—into a single canvas. All you do is design something once, like your slide deck around a new product, and with a button press, you can transform it into another piece of media—like a social post, or a website, or a poster. You never have to change the window you’re viewing, or hop to another app. As an added bonus, a team of colleagues can hop into that canvas together at the same time, co-designing and leaving notes as they go. Truthfully, the new Visual Suite is but one of of Canva’s quietly AI-powered tools that it’s launched in the last year, including spreadsheets and a vibe coding tool. No wonder the company continued to grow at an increasing pace in 2025—breaking $3.5 billion in revenue which saw 30% growth, doubling its speed of enterprise customer acquisition, and adding 85 million new users. 6. Veritiv For implementing greener packaging materials at scale The endless cadence of products arriving on our doorsteps come with more than just a monetary cost: it also takes a huge toll on the environmental. But Veritiv , a packaging and distribution company that serves companies including Amazon, Fedex, Disney, Unilever, and ULTA Beauty, has focused its business on reducing the waste of its own packaging. At its newly expanded, Silicon Valley-based Sustainable Design Lab, Veritiv keeps a library of hundreds of cutting edge sustainable materials from around the world, which it tests, validates, and works into its own customer packaging. The company is an accelerator for promising packaging solutions developed around the globe. That means that Veritiv will wrap something cold in an experimental insulated pack before tossing it into a high temperature room, or simulate the tumbles and other hits a package suffers on its way to your door. This is essential work, as much of the green materials industry is nascent, and often doesn’t live up to its own claims. Veritiv has already gotten clients like Amazon to trade polypropylene bags for clear Vela paper, and others to swap bubble wrap for honeycomb FlexiHex paper sleeves (the latter of which has added up to more than 2.5 million shipments over the last two years). And in the next year, it plans to introduce new offerings like seaweed-based films and cellulose-based packing peanuts, wiping microplastics out of the supply chain. Veritiv’s motivation is two-fold: It’s looking to reduce its own footprint within the vast global trade market. But secondly, greener packaging is also a means to save its clients across the U.S. money, as 15 states either have introduce, or are introducing, extra disposal fees on plastics like bubble wraps and pill packs—with fees up to 30x higher on styrofoams than paper products. By adopting greener packaging, they can actually lower overhead right alongside their carbon footprint. Fueled by an aggressive expansion plan, which includes half a dozen acquisitions a year, Veritiv added $3 billion in revenue over the past two years. It’s currently the largest specialty packaging company in the U.S. 7. Metalab For becoming the go-to design firm for the UX of AI products Metalab has quickly become a go-to design partner for AI companies to articulate the UX and brand of their products. The company partnered with Midjourney, Suno, Pika, Crusoe, and Windsurf in just over a year’s time—defining the experience behind companies worth more than $10 billion and hundreds of millions of users in aggregate. For the generative media platform Midjourney, Metalab moved the company off of Discord into its own dedicated web interface—upgrading the chat-based UI into a rich, multimedia-heavy, collaborative studio (which is estimated to help double Midjourney’s 2025 revenues to $500 million). At Suno, an AI music generator, Metalab helped design everything from the sunburned, Y2K brand to the interface that feels like the lovechild of Apple Music and TikTok . These contributions helped the company’s app to launch at #11 in the App Store (with 25 million people having created a song since). At the data center company Crusoe, a rebranding project—anchoring the entire business in a sustainable vision—preceded a $1.375 billion fundraise on a $10 billion valuation. Metalab also took early steps in modernizing journalism for the AI era as it teamed up with Politico , CNN, and The Athletic to build out new AI tools. Perhaps the largest of such projects was for The Atlantic , for which it built a custom Companion interface to search 167 years of the publication’s articles. 8. Netflix For creating a house party for the fans of its hit shows Netflix has long resisted the idea of opening its own movie theaters. And maybe for good reason. While movie theaters are struggling, Netflix’s streaming service grew revenue 18% in 2025. It’s why Netflix House , the company’s first permanent retail concept, is almost anything but a movie theater. Following the popups it’s hosted since 2020, in which millions of people attended projects like a Bridgerton ball, the first two locations opened in Pennsylvania and Texas in late 2025. Clocking in at over 100,000 square-feet apiece, they are where Netflix shows come to life in massive, immersive environments. They invite you to step into the maudlin boarding school of Wednesday , hunt for mysteries out of Stranger Things , and break out of jail alongside One Piece ’s band of pirates—through hand crafted set pieces that Netflix plans to ship across the country. This is all on top of Is It Cake? minigolf, a Netflix Bites restaurant, a shop, and, yes, precisely one movie theater that’s free to attend for community events. The vibe is a modern cineplex, albeit with a lot more focus on live interaction, and set pieces that are meant to be swapped out as quickly as Netflix shows go viral. “We want it to be a place that’s not just like a special occasion destination,” says Lee. “We want you to come back over and over again.” As Gen Z and millennials chase down real experiences to counter screen time, events ranging from concerts to experimental theater are growing 21% a year since 2019, according to the research firm Habo. Early reports on Netflix House looked similarly positive. Netflix welcomed over 100,000 visitors to each of its locations in their first two weeks of operation. A third location planned for Las Vegas will open in 2027 as the company validates and refines the idea for exponential expansion. 9. BioRender For becoming the de facto way to visualize scientific research Data analysis and visualization is among the most painful parts of scientific research, and BioRender has quickly ascended to be the platform of choice to do so. You can drop in a spreadsheet and instantly have it analyzed and rendered in many different ways, sidestepping the flow between data sets and standalone data viz tools. That impact has been seismic on research in both public institutions and 250 global biotech and pharma companies. Nineteen percent of all biology papers published in Nature last year used diagrams from the software, with half a million researchers using it each month around the globe as its user base grew 25%. In 2025, BioRender supercharged its tools with the biggest updates in the platform’s history: an airier, more pleasant interface, backed by new AI that’s capable of automatically spotting variables in a data set to analyze and produce graphs from plain language prompts. The company also consolidated files into enterprise workspaces, allowing an organization to share brand templates when presenting research. Ultimately, BioRender is something like Canva for scientific visualization, where you can even bring in 3D protein maps with a tap. 10. Nike For completely redefining performance garments, again For the past several years, Nike has been fairly criticized for forgetting the innovation that made it the leading performance footwear company in the world. But working under new leadership and restructured innovation teams, Nike has shared not one, but several new visions for footwear that push the boundaries of what sneakers can do. In early 2025, it launched a collaboration with Hyperice, turning circulation-promoting leggings into a boot that can be worn on a walk to help warm up and recovery. Then later in the year at an Innovation Summit hosted in Beaverton, OR, it debuted a suite of new genre-bending products coming to market in 2026: A robotic achilles tendon called Project Amplify , that imagines an exoskeleton in a shoe. A neurologically-stimulating Nike Mind shoe that increases the same alpha waves in your brain activated by calming, meditative practice. And a Project Milano jacket debuting at the Winter Olympics, which instead of down insulation, inflates with air to keep you warm—until you get too hot, and with a button press, you can deflate it. Nike revenue had only grown 1% year over year, as of December 2025. But consumer sentiment around Nike skyrocketed around the announcement of these Innovation Summit products—reaching a 97% positive rating over the following 24 hours, garnering 850 million views across traditional and social media in the U.S. in the month following. Explore the full 2026 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies , 720 honorees that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 59 categories, including advertising , applied AI , biotech , retail , sustainability , and more.