What Happened When We Took the SCiO Food Analyzer Grocery Shopping

Photo: Tekla Perry

I’m at a Whole Foods in Palo Alto with Dror Sharon, cofounder and CEO of Consumer Physics, based in San Francisco and Israel. Sharon is holding his smartphone and a tiny handheld device he calls SCiO, which is about the size of a TicTac box. We are browsing around the produce department, checking out the Brix level of various items. The Brix number represents the sugar content of a solution and, for fruits, is an indicator of whether or not a particular fruit has much flavor. The tomatoes, according to the SCiO’s accompanying smartphone app, are horrible; not a big surprise in March. The apples are mixed, there is only one variety Sharon would buy right now. The mangos, he proclaims, are just perfect, and contemplates filling a bag before we go.

Photo: Tekla PerryTesting the SCiO portable analyzer at the Whole Foods dairy case

We move onto the dairy case, where the labels of cellophane-wrapped cheeses provided only price and name. Sharon’s smartphone app popped up all sorts of additional information as he pointed the SCiO gadget at different chunks (still in their wrapping), including fat content, calories per gram, and protein content.

Introduction to SCiO from Consumer Physics on Vimeo.

On the way to Whole Foods, we stopped outside a restaurant where two women were having brunch, and asked them if we could scan their food before they ate it. Sharon told them the strawberries would be excellent (they women agreed they were), but the whipped cream would be abnormally sweet, there was so much sugar in it wasn’t recognizable as dairy (it was).

It was all pretty magical, pointing a gadget at food and getting an instant analysis. To be fair, I can’t verify the accuracy of what I was seeing on the screen; I didn’t take the fruits and cheeses back to a laboratory to confirm the analysis using more traditional technology. But it certainly seemed real, real enough that I would be pretty excited to have this kind of technology built into my smart phone, given I have my phone out anyway when I’m grocery shopping to scan shelf tags in order to download coupons. And Sharon promises it is indeed coming into phones—as soon as the third quarter of this year in China, fourth quarter in the United States.

Here’s how SCiO works—and why it exists.

Photo: Tekla PerryThese apples should be pretty good

The gadget uses standard infrared spectroscopy; it measures the absorption of infrared light. It may not be as accurate as a benchtop spectrometer used in a laboratory environment, but Sharon says it makes up for this with its algorithms. The user starts out by simplifying the problem a bit by identifying the category of the item to be examined—it’s not “What fruit is this,” but, “This is an apple, is it any good?” Consumer Physics’ cloud-based software then taps into its knowledge base, for an apple, it defines “good” as “sweet” (hence the Brix measurement), and considers an apple’s typical range of sweetness based on thousands of scans. A graphic on the phone then places the apple on a quality range.

Besides having data on most fruits and vegetables, the system also knows about dairy products; for those, it provides information on calories and fat content. And it knows about the cocoa content of chocolate, the amount of alcohol in drinks, and the protein, fat, and calories in raw fish, poultry, beef, and pork. And while, to date, the focus has been on food, Sharon stresses that the technology works with all sorts of materials. The company has started holding workshops for people who want to develop their own databases.

Sharon had been wanting this kind of gadget for a long time before he finally set out to build one. He grew up on a farm in Israel; he was used to eating produce that hadn’t been shipped further than across the property. So, when he moved to Massachusetts for business school at MIT (his bachelor’s degree is in electrical engineering), he was surprised by just how tasteless he found the produce at local groceries. “The food just didn’t taste the same. And when I saw that I was buying grapes from Chile, I was sure something was not right about them.”

He decided that he should get himself something to determine whether or not the food in the stores was any good before he bought it, so he logged onto Amazon and searched for such a gadget. He didn’t find one. Disappointed, he resigned himself to occasionally buying tasteless produce or traveling 30 miles to a grocer he discovered that he could trust.

But about five years later, in 2010, after a few years working in the U.S. and then moving back to Israel, he came back to the idea. There ought to be a scanner that could give you useful information about the food you are about to buy, he insisted. He teamed up with Damian Goldring, a friend from his undergraduate days with a PhD in silicon photonics, and the two started investigating sensing technologies that, potentially, could be built into a phone. They landed on infrared spectrometry, and, in 2011, started Consumer Physics. In mid-2012, they rented one of those expensive, luggable, commercial spectrometers for a day and demonstrated to a large cellular service provider that the technology could be used to analyze food, doing a demo on chocolate mixtures that looked the same, but had different substances mixed in, like regular butter and peanut butter. “We’re going to put this into a phone,” Sharon said. (The company didn’t fund them.)

Photo: Tekla PerryDon’t buy these tomatoes

Sharon and Goldring may not have convinced that company, but they had convinced themselves, and began working on the technology, first on their own dime, and then with a little money from angel investors and crowd-sourced funding from OurCrowd. In early 2014, they were convinced enough that they could deliver the technology as a small Bluetooth peripheral—not inside a phone quite yet, but pretty close—to launch a Kickstarter campaign, pitching a $200 portable infrared spectrometer. Some 13,000 people signed up, ponying up about $2.7 million.

Things from Kickstarter funding to shipped product were not exactly smooth sailing. Come September of 2016, we reported that only 5000 of the Kickstarter backers had received products, far later than originally estimated, and many of the remaining backers were angry. To make things worse, the backers could no longer communicate with the company via Kickstarter, the page had been taken down in a trademark dispute over the name “SCiO”.

What happened? Sharon says the delays were due to manufacturing challenges, as well as a redesign to improve sensitivity, resistance to ambient light, and penetration depth. And the company has now fulfilled almost all of its Kickstarter orders, with the exception of customers who haven’t yet provided shipping addresses, have unique shipping requirements, or are choosing to wait for a Special Edition version of the gadget—that’s fewer than 10 percent of the backers, Sharon says.

But while the Kickstarter rollout was more than normally bumpy, the company’s efforts to get venture funding have born, well, fruit. After picking up some funding from angel investors and people using crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, Consumer Physics closed a round of venture investment led by Khosla Ventures. To date, Sharon said, funding totals over $25 million.

Photo: Tekla PerryThanks to Analog Devices, the SCiO technology can now fit inside a smart phone

The company also lined up some critical partnerships: with Analog Devices, which worked with the company to reduce the size of the sensor package into something that will easily fit into smartphones and is manufacturing this version of the device; and with Chinese phone manufacturer Changhong, which will be incorporating the technology in the Changhong H2 smartphone starting in China in the third quarter of this year and in the U.S. towards the end of 2017. Consumers in China, Sharon points out, are particularly interested in checking food safety, given the history of problems with the food supply. Sharon hopes other smartphone manufacturers will follow, turning using a phone to scan food as common a practice as using one to photograph food.

Consumer Physics now has about 100 employees, with corporate offices in San Francisco, a sales team based in the Midwestern United States, and a development team in Israel. Dozens of people are scanning food 24/7, Sharon said, to increase the kinds of food that can be analyzed as well as the accuracy of the analysis.

While the initial applications surround food, Sharon says that the technology is not just for checking out food freshness and nutritional information; it’s good at analyzing body fat, and distinguishing real pharmaceuticals from their fake counterparts. “We’ve done a demo that distinguishes real Viagra from fake Viagra,” says Sharon. “That’s the most commonly counterfeited drug.”

Consumer Physics has, to date, shipped more than 3000 developer kits, and is hoping some interesting consumer applications will emerge. One such in the works by French company Terallion, Sharon said, is a kitchen scale, intended for diabetics, that can use SCiO’s analysis to allow it to give users accurate information about protein and carbohydrate content of the food they are about to eat. The company is also working directly with industrial partners, in particular, with those working to develop tools for digital agriculture.

ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum

By Tekla S. Perry

14 Mar 2017

More than 100 Nobel laureates are calling on Greenpeace to end its anti-GMO campaign

Rice field in the Philippines. No Golden Rice here (yet).(Shutterstock)

This week, 109 Nobel laureates signed onto a sharply worded letter to Greenpeace urging the environmental group to rethink its longstanding opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The writers argue that the anti-GMO campaign is scientifically baseless and potentially harmful to poor people in the developing world.

Joel Achenbach broke the news in the Washington Post, and you can read the full letter here. The signatories include past winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics.

Nobel laureates to Greenpeace: Your anti-GMO campaign has to end

The letter notes that scientific assessments have repeatedly found GM foods are just as safe to eat as conventional foods and don’t pose an inherent risk to the environment (though, like any technology, they can be misused). Greenpeace, it argues, is on the wrong side here:

We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against "GMOs" in general and Golden Rice in particular.

Scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.

The laureates also take Greenpeace to task for seeking to block Golden Rice, a strain of not-yet-approved rice that has been genetically enhanced to produce beta carotene — which, its creators hope, might one day alleviate the Vitamin A deficiency that’s causing widespread death and blindness in the developing world:

Greenpeace has spearheaded opposition to Golden Rice, which has the potential to reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by a vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia. ...

WE CALL UPON GREENPEACE to cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general;

Now, Greenpeace is far from the only reason Golden Rice has struggled to get regulatory approval — the crop also faces very serious technical challenges. Greenpeace isn’t even the only group seeking to block it. But they’re certainly a high-profile face of GMO opposition, so the laureates are focusing on them.

In a posted response, Greenpeace denied that they were the main reason Golden Rice has failed to come to market, but still showed no sign of ending their broader anti-GMO campaign. We'll get to that, but I do want to elaborate on a few issues the letter raises.

Greenpeace accepts climate science. So why do they dismiss GMO science?

(MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images)A picture taken on May 3, 2005, shows Greenpeace activists flying a kite displaying a giant corn cob on a field in Seelow, Eastern Germany, to protest against the cultivation of genetically modified maize.

Let’s start off by noting that GMOs will never be a purely scientific issue. Like every policy matter on the planet, the question of how best to incorporate biotechnology into agriculture involves value judgments about what an ideal food system might look like, how to weigh the risks against the benefits, and so on.

But those positions can at least be informed by scientific understanding. To take a different example, on climate change, Greenpeace tends to take very seriously what scientists are telling them. Their website refers frequently to the scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer and humans are the cause.

By contrast, Greenpeace’s public statements on GMOs tend to be startlingly unscientific. On their website, they refer to transgenic crops as "genetic pollution." This is absurd. When scientists create transgenic crops, they frequently use Agrobacterium to transfer genes from one plant or organism to another. But nature does this too: Scientists recently discovered that on two separate occasions in history, Agrobacterium transferred bacterial DNA into the sweet potatoes we now eat. Are sweet potatoes also "polluted"? Because it's the same thing.

In fact, many crop scientists tend to see GMOs as sitting along a continuum. Humans have long used all sorts of tools to alter plant DNA and get crops with the traits we desire — this is a big reason farms can feed 7 billion people every year. For thousands of years, farmers interbred crops to alter their genes. Like so:

(James Kennedy)

In the 20th century, plant breeders began exposing crops to radiation or mutagenic chemicals to scramble their DNA and get new traits. Today, scientists use advanced techniques (like transferring genes or CRISPR) that allow even more precision. But it’s the same basic idea. Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that GMOs don't appear to pose a special health risk. They’re just not fundamentally different.

Now, the vast majority of the public is unaware of this fact. Most people don’t spend much time thinking about how our food is created. (One of the lovely things about the modern age is that we don’t have to.) So, in the abstract, people tend to fall back on their intuitions: Tampering with the DNA of food seems inherently unnatural. Anything "unnatural" triggers disgust. Therefore, GMOs are bad.

Those intuitions are understandable. But they're unsupported by scientific evidence. And rather than seeking to correct those misapprehensions, as they do on climate change, Greenpeace has long sought to inflame those fears. Take this line from their website: "When we force life forms and our world's food supply to conform to human economic models rather than their natural ones, we do so at our own peril." (Never mind that we’ve been doing this since the dawn of civilization.)

The Nobel laureates are, in essence, telling them to knock it off.

Ultimately, the world will face staggering challenges around food and agriculture in the 21st century. The global population is expected to soar past 9 billion, and we’ll need to figure out how to feed everyone without razing too many forests for farmland. Farmers will have to handle the droughts and heat waves that will come with global warming. There are tricky issues around antibiotic overuse, nitrogen pollution, food distribution, and much more.

Genetic engineering certainly won’t solve all those problems. (It might not even solve most of them.) But it ispotentially a valuable tool for, say, breeding plants with higher drought tolerance or engineering foods that are more nutritious. See, for example, this important work on vitamin-fortified bananas in Africa. We should be thinking seriously about how to use these tools as a larger strategy for improving our food system — not sowing fears about "genetic pollution."

Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice is incoherent — though the crop faces other serious challenges

(David Greedy/Getty Images)Plant Biotechnologist Dr. Swapan Datta inspects a genetically modified "Golden Rice" plant at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), November 27, 2003.

The Nobel laureate letter particularly criticizes Greenpeace’s opposition to Golden Rice — rice that’s being modified in an attempt to alleviate Vitamin A deficiency — and here it’s worth expanding a bit.

Last year in Slate, Will Saletan wrote a damning piece on how incoherent Greenpeace’s campaign against Golden Rice was. As research advanced, the group kept shifting its position. A sample:

In 2001, Benedikt Haerlin, Greenpeace’s anti-GMO coordinator, appeared with Potrykus at a press conference in France. Haerlin conceded that Golden Rice served "a good purpose" and posed "a moral challenge to our position." Greenpeace couldn’t dismiss the rice as poison. So it opposed the project on technical grounds: Golden Rice didn’t produce enough beta carotene. …

While critics tried to block the project, Potrykus and his colleagues worked to improve the rice. By 2003 they had developed plants with eight times as much beta carotene as the original version. In 2005 they unveiled a line that had 20 times as much beta carotene as the original. GMO critics could no longer dismiss Golden Rice as inadequate. So they reversed course. Now that the rice produced plenty of beta carotene, anti-GMO activists claimed that beta carotene and vitamin A were dangerous. …

In the Philippines, where Greenpeace was fighting to block field trials of Golden Rice, its hypocrisy was egregious. "It is irresponsible to impose GE 'Golden' rice on people if it goes against their religious beliefs, cultural heritage and sense of identity, or simply because they do not want it," Greenpeace declared. But just below that pronouncement, Greenpeace recommended "vitamin A supplementation and vitamin fortification of foods as successfully implemented in the Philippines." 

Under Philippine law, beta carotene and vitamin A had to be added to sugar, flour, and cooking oil prior to distribution. The government administered capsules to preschoolers twice a year, and to some pregnant women for 28 consecutive days. If Greenpeace seriously believed that retinoids caused birth defects and should be a matter of personal choice, it would never have endorsed these programs.

It goes on and on like this. Greenpeace has simply dismissed scientific reviews showing that Golden Rice does not pose a threat to human health or the environment. Instead, it continues to file petitions to block all field trials and feeding studies in places like the Philippines.

Now, to repeat what I said above: Greenpeace and other anti-GMO groups aren’t the only obstacle to getting Golden Rice into farmers’ fields. It is fundamentally hard to create a high-yielding strain of rice that consistently produces higher levels of beta carotene. Even after 24 years of testing, researchers still haven’t been able to get Golden Rice to work perfectly in field trials. And they might be struggling even if Greenpeace had given them a pass all along.

In a reply to the Nobel laureates' letter, Greenpeace insisted as much: "Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘Golden’ rice are false," said Wilhelmina Pelegrina, Campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia "‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research."

True. But rather irrelevant. It is also fundamentally hard to create a Zika vaccine. It would nonetheless be misguided for me to wage a campaign against researchers working on the project or file a petition to stop trials without any good evidence that it was a risk — even if my protests weren’t the main hold-up.

On a final note, I do think Greenpeace does enormously vital work around the world. They played a crucial role in pressuring soy and beef companies in Brazil to reduce deforestation of the Amazon. Their efforts in China to pare back unnecessary coal-burning plants are one of the most consequential climate campaigns going.

But on GMOs, they are very much in the wrong. Let's hope this letter prods them to reflect and reconsider.

Go deeper:

• Mark Lynas, an environmentalist who did reconsider his opposition to GMOs after reviewing the scientific evidence,wrote a post pleading with Greenpeace to do the same.
• Five big takeaways from the most thorough review of GMOs yet.
• More on how GMOs sit along a continuum with a great many other farming practices and even "natural" changes.
• Here's what 9,000 years of breeding have done to corn, peaches, and other crops

ORIGINAL: Vox

by Brad Plumer

June 30, 2016

50 Smartest Companies 2016

50 Smartest Companies 2016. Credit: Illustration by Matthew Hollister

1. Amazon
2. Baidu
3. Illumina
4. Tesla Motors
5. Aquion Energy
6. Mobileye
7. 23andMe
8. Alphabet
9. Spark Therapeutics
10. Huawei
11. First Solar
12. Nvidia
13. Cellectis
14. Enlitic
15. Facebook
16. SpaceX
17. Toyota
18. Airware
19. IDE Technologies
20. Tencent
21. Didi Chuxing
22. Oxford Nanopore
23. 24M
24. Alibaba
25. Bristol-Myers Squibb
26. Microsoft
27. Fanuc
28. Sonnen
29. Improbable
30. Movidius
31. Intrexon
32. Carbon
33. Bosch
34. T2 Biosystems
35. Editas Medicine
36. Nestlé
37. RetroSense Therapeutics
38. Line, subsidiary of Naver
39. TransferWise
40. Veritas Genetics
41. FireEye
42. SevenBridges
43. Slack
44. Coupang
45. IBM
46. Snapchat
47. Africa Internet Group
48. LittleBits
49. Intel
50. Monsanto

Our editors pick the 50 companies that best combine innovative technology with an effective business model.

Each year we identify 50 companies that are “smart” in the way they create new opportunities. Some of this year’s stars are large companies, like Amazon and Alphabet, that are using digital technologies to redefine industries. Others are wrestling with technological changes: companies like Microsoft, Bosch, Toyota, and Intel. Also on the list are ambitious startups like 23andMe, a pioneer in consumer-accessible DNA testing; 24M, a reinventor of battery technology; and Didi Chuxing, a four-year-old ride-hailing app that’s beating Uber in the Chinese market. Still, despite the excitement of recent advances in such fields as artificial intelligence and genomic medicine, technology has failed to energize the overall economy. In our opening essay, we explore why that is so and what needs to change.

1 Amazon

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Public

Valuation: $337 billion

Last year we included Amazon on our list of the 50 Smartest Companies for incorporating robots into its fulfillment centers. This year the standout is the surprising success of its Alexa Voice Service and the growing family of devices it powers (the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Tap). Alexa makes it easy to search the Web, play music, and adjust your lights and thermostat—just by speaking inside your home. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing operation, also deserves notice as the Industry: leader and Amazon’s fastest-growing and most profitable division.

$89.99 What the Echo Dot, the most affordable device to feature Alexa Voice Service, sells for.

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2 Baidu

Headquarters: Beijing, China

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Public

Valuation: $55 billion

Outside its core business of Internet search and ad sales, Baidu is doing notable work on speech recognition and conversational interfaces. In 2015, it announced the development of a speech recognition engine called Deep Speech 2 that uses deep learning to recognize spoken words, sometimes more accurately than a person can. Baidu conducts AI research in part to improve its products and services and better compete with rivals such as Alibaba and Tencent. The company is also aggressively pursuing the autonomous-car market and recently established a team in Silicon Valley to lead research and engineering in computer vision, robotics, and sensors, among other areas.

100 Baidu plans to employ more than 100 autonomous-car researchers and engineers in California by year’s end.

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3 Illumina

Headquarters: San Diego, California

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $20 billion

The world’s largest DNA-sequencing company hopes to expand its technology’s role in diagnosing illness. This year it formed a new companyto develop blood tests that cost $1,000 or less and can detect many types of cancer before symptoms arise, greatly improving the chances of survival. The spinoff, called Grail, is being headed by Jeff Huber, a former senior Google executive who lost his wife to colon cancer. The testing concept, sometimes called a “liquid biopsy,” uses Illumina’s high-speed sequencing machines to scour a person’s blood for fragments of DNA released by cancer cells.

$2.2 billion Revenue reached last year, up 19 percent from the previous year.

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4 Tesla Motors

Headquarters: Palo Alto, California

Industry: Transportation

Status: Public

Valuation: $28 billion

Tesla topped this list last year for its plan to extend its battery technology from cars to residential and commercial applications. This year, Tesla’s Autopilot technology stands out for the way it integrates feedback from a camera, radar, ultrasonic sensors, and GPS to aid drivers on highways, help them avoid collisions, and assist them in parking. Besides advancing semi-autonomous driving, Tesla is also making electric vehicles more accessible by introducing its most affordable car yet, the $35,000 Model 3.

50 percent According to CEO Elon Musk, drivers have a 50 percent lower chance of having an accident when driving with Tesla Autopilot.

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5 Aquion Energy

Headquarters: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Industry: Energy

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $190 million raised

Aquion continues to raise money for its innovative batteries, which have made it a successful startup in a notoriously tough Industry:. Investors include Bill Gates and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as the corporate venture capital arms of energy Industry: giants Shell and Total. Invented by Carnegie Mellon professor Jay Whitacre, the batteries are made with nontoxic materials that can provide long-term storage of energy from solar, wind, and other intermittent sources at a very low cost. Whitacre says the company’s been disciplined in its development of a manufacturing process, basing it on existing models and materials to improve its chance of working.

Backers Include Bill Gates, Shell.

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6 Mobileye

Headquarters: Jerusalem, Israel

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $8 billion

How can automakers compete with companies developing self-driving vehicles, such as Google parent Alphabet? One increasingly popular option is to partner with Mobileye, which makes machine vision systems and motion detection algorithms that warn drivers when they are deviating from driving lanes or about to collide with cars in front of them. Mobileye is already working on autopilot and collision avoidance technology for Audi, BMW, General Motors, Nissan, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo and recently inked an agreement with two undisclosed automakers to provide systems for fully autonomous cars.

600 Number of employees who are annotating the images used to train its autonomous driving system.

7 23andMe

Headquarters: Mountain View, California

Industry: Biotech

Status: Private

Valuation: $1.1 billion Valuation:

Now focused on getting its customers to share their data with medical researchers, 23andMe has partnered with leading medical centers, including Stanford and Mount Sinai. To date, the company has gathered DNA from more than one million customers, more than 80 percent of whom they say are participating in research.

One million The company has sequenced the DNA of more than one million customers.

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8 Alphabet

Headquarters: Mountain View, California

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Public

Valuation: $491 billion

Google parent company Alphabet pursues many projects, including a number of riskier “moon shot” technologies, but its ventures into AI and autonomous driving are the standouts. Earlier this year, DeepMind—which is part of Google—attracted global attention for beating a world champion player at the game Go. The matchup revealed the sophistication of its AI technology. Alphabet also continues to work on fully autonomous cars and recently signed a deal to incorporate its technology into Chrysler minivans—its first partnership with a major automaker.

1.6 million Number of miles Alphabet’s autonomous cars have driven so far.

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9 Spark Therapeutics

Headquarters: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $918 million

The company’s focus is on developing one-time, life-altering treatments for debilitating genetic diseases, a whole new model of personalized, precise treatment. Many of its key personnel come from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and their work focuses on finding treatments for rare diseases where no or only palliative therapies exist currently.

Collaborators Corporate collaborators include Pfizer, Genable Technologies, and Clearside Biomedical.

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10 Huawei

Headquarters: Shenzhen, China

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $1 billion

Huawei has been selling cell phones for more than a decade and smartphones since 2009, but it long struggled to break into the premium-device and U.S. markets. Its 2015 launch of the Nexus 6P phone, which it co-designed and manufactured for Google, showed it can make high-end, high-quality smartphones. Continued strength in entry-level devices, coupled with growing clout in more expensive phones, helped Huawei grow smartphone shipments 58 percent year-over-year and become the no. 3 smartphone vendor worldwide.

27.5 million Number of smartphones Huawei shipped in the first quarter of 2016, according to market researcher IDC.

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11First Solar

Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona

Industry: Energy

Status: Public

Valuation: $5 billion

First Solar designs and manufactures solar panels using a low-cost thin-film semiconductor technology and also develops solar farms that utilities can use. It differs from many solar companies in that it is in the black, making $546 million in profit in 2015 on nearly $3.6 billion in revenue.

$546 million Profits earned in 2015.

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12 Nvidia

Headquarters: Santa Clara, California

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $22 billion

A number of chip makers are targeting the autonomous-car market, andNvidia is distinguishing itself by offering an entire platform and accompanying software development kit for self-driving cars. The platform uses AI to give vehicles “360° situational awareness.” Nvidia says that more than 50 automakers (including Audi, BMW, Ford, and Tesla), suppliers, developers, and research institutions are experimenting with the platform. Nvidia is also using its strength in gaming graphics chips to move into the VR market and released a platform (chip module plus developer kit) for drones last year.

$1.3 billion Revenue increased 13 percent in the most recent quarter, to $1.3 billion, compared with $1.15 billion a year ago.

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13 Cellectis

Headquarters: New York City, New York

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $1 billion

Cellectis is scheduled to do a formal trial of its engineered immune cells as a leukemia treatment as soon as this year. This field of immune engineering was one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2016, and Cellectis is shaping its early development.

$300 million Though not profitable, the company has over $300 million in cash, enough to last through 2018.

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14 Enlitic

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Industry: Biotech

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $15 million raised

Enlitic produces deep-learning software that can analyze x-rays. It’s being tested by radiologists in Australia, which will be key to establishing how well it can help doctors make diagnoses and design treatments. The recent departure of its founder Jeremy Howard, well known in the machine-learning field, seems to pose a challenge for the company, but new leadership asserts that applications of its algorithms will soon expand to the detection of lung cancer and bone fractures.

50 percent Claims its algorithm read chest CT images 50 percent more accurately than experts in its own test.

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15 Facebook

Headquarters: Menlo Park, California

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Public

Valuation: $345 billion

Facebook continues to develop its mobile advertising business and refine its mobile apps, but the Oculus Rift is its most exciting technology right now. Following years of anticipation, the virtual-reality headset was released in late March.

$599 Rift sells for $599.

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16 SpaceX

Headquarters: Hawthorne, California

Industry: Transportation

Status: Private

Valuation: $12 billion

If spaceflight were more affordable, more missions could be flown, more scientific discoveries could be made, and new business opportunities could open up. SpaceX has figured out the first step toward driving down costs by landing its rocket boosters on ships after sending them into space. Retrieving rockets makes it possible to reuse them. SpaceX plans to eventually schedule launches every few weeks.

Four Number of times SpaceX attempted to land a rocket on a barge before succeeding.

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17 Toyota

Headquarters: Toyota City, Japan

Industry: Transportation

Status: Public

Valuation: $152 billion

The Toyota Research Institute will study the future of mobility, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Other recent forward-looking moves include the launch of Mirai, a hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle for the mass market. Mirai has a range of over 300 miles and emits only water vapor. Toyota is now working on developing a network of affordable hydrogen fuel stations.

Leader Roboticist Gill Pratt is CEO of the Toyota Research Institute.

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18 Airware

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $70 million raised

Airware is already one of the biggest drone startups, having raised more than $70 million in venture funding, and it is poised to become much bigger. Rather than actually making drones, it provides a control system for any type of drone.

Leader Airware’s founder and CEO also leads an investment fund that supports businesses creating technologies for commercial drones.

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19 IDE Technologies

Headquarters: Kadima, Israel

Industry: Energy

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available (owned in equal parts by publicly traded Delek Group and Israel Chemical)

Its large-scale desalination process is finding more customers. In the U.S. IDE won the job of reactivating a mothballed plant in Santa Barbara, California, and its prospects look strong as long as extracting salt from water to make it potable continues to be economical. Demand will certainly be there: worldwide, some 700 million people don’t have access to enough clean water, and that number is expected to explode to 1.8 billion by 2025.

26 percent By October IDE will be producing 26 percent of Santa Barbara’s water.

20 Tencent

Headquarters: Shenzhen, China

Industry: Transportation

Status: Public

Valuation: $193 billion

Tencent is Asia’s largest Internet company, with a well-used Web portal and a messaging app, WeChat, that is China’s largest. The company recently branched into the enterprise market by launching a business-focused version of WeChat that facilitates communication (messages, phone calls, e-mails) between colleagues, as well as employee expense reports and other record-keeping. Since Tencent derives most of its revenue from online and smartphone games, it has also been investing in mobile-games companies, including the U.S. firms Glu Mobile, and Pocket Gems. It recently bought Riot Games, which makes the hit League of Legends.

78 percent Tencent’s largest business segment, mostly games, accounts for 78 percent of its revenue.

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21 Didi Chuxing

Headquarters: Beijing, China

Industry: Transportation

Status: Private

Valuation: Reported Valuation: $28 billion

Chinese roads are jammed, and a rise in car ownership has led to a jump in people interested in part-time driving work, but competition with Uber has been fierce. Uber and Didi are battling for market share by paying drivers subsidies to pick up rides. Didi claims its drivers complete 14 million rides a day to Uber’s one million. The company’s ambitions don’t end at China’s borders. It has partnerships in India and Southeast Asia, including stakes in Lyft and Indian ride-share app Ola.

14 million Number of rides its drivers complete a day.

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22 Oxford Nanopore

Headquarters: Oxford, United Kingdom

Industry: Biotech

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $355 million raised

Its sequencer is small and portable—greatly expanding its applications and market—because it analyzes DNA by drawing the molecules through tiny, delicate pores. The platform, which went on sale in 2015 and is enough of a threat to competitor Illumina to draw a lawsuit, can analyze DNA, RNA, proteins, and other types of molecules. Potential applications include scientific research, personalized medicine, food safety, crop science, and security and defense. It will soon be tested in space.

Intellectual property Illumina, once an investor, is now suing the company for patent infringement.

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23 24M

Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Industry: Energy

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $50 million raised

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from smartphones and tablets to electric cars and buses. They are expensive, however, and cumbersome to manufacture. Startup 24M developed a new design and manufacturing process that will cut costs. The battery Industry: is striving to produce batteries that cost $100 per kilowatt-hour or less, and 24M says its batteries will cross that threshold sooner than competitors—by 2020.

50 percent The company claims it can reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries by 50 percent.

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24 Alibaba

Headquarters: Hangzhou, China

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Public

Valuation: $192 billion

Alibaba, which runs an eBay-like store, a popular virtual mall, and other e-commerce services, is now the world’s largest online marketplace as measured by annual gross merchandise volume. The growth of mobile and video ads also favors Alibaba, which already dominates the Chinese mobile-ad market and recently acquired Youku Tudou, China’s largest online video service. Beyond China, Alibaba has become a backer of other technology companies. In the past year, it invested in Groupon, Magic Leap, and Snapchat in the U.S., as well as the Indian payments and commerce business Paytm and Singapore’s national postal and logistics company, SingPost.

$485 billion Gross value of merchandise sold through Alibaba in its last fiscal year.

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25 Bristol-Myers Squibb

Headquarters: New York City, New York

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $119 billion

Leads in cancer immunotherapy, working on “checkpoint inhibitors" for numerous forms of cancer. Opdivo, one of two inhibitors the company markets, works by allowing immune-system T cells to attack cancer. It’s approved for skin, lung, and kidney cancer, and when successful, the treatments appear to have enabled patients’ immune systems to eradicate their tumors. It is expensive, however, and that has caused issues with European regulators.

Five years One-third of patients with advanced melanoma survived for five years in a study of Opdivo.

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26 Microsoft

Headquarters: Redmond, Washington

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $405 billion

When we included Microsoft on last year’s list for its HoloLens augmented-reality technology, the system had not yet shipped. Now a preproduction “Developer Edition” is available and Microsoft is starting to use it for augmented-reality experiences. Attempting to switch its focus from desktop software to cloud and mobile services, and having recently announced a mammoth $26 billion purchase of business social network LinkedIn, the company is also pushing forward with innovative research, including some on deep neural networks that it has incorporated into Skype for simultaneous language translation. The research will also be applied to a variety of computer vision tasks.

152 A Microsoft network that won a global image recognition contest in 2015 used 152 layers of virtual neurons.

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27 Fanuc

Headquarters: Oshino-mura, Japan

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $30 billion

Fanuc began as part of Fujitsu and is the world’s largest maker of industrial robots. It recently announced a novel technology that will connect robots to networks so factory owners can download apps to them. In June 2015, Fanuc also partnered with a Japanese machine-learning company to create artificial-intelligence technology that enables its robots to learn skills independently.

Eight Number of hours a Fanuc robot needs to learn a task with 90 percent accuracy.

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28 Sonnen

Headquarters: Wildpoldsried, Germany

Industry: Energy

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, more than $20 million raised, including GE Ventures’ recent investment

Its system connects homes with solar panels to lithium batteries in a storage system it calls a virtual power plant, offering consumers electricity that is 25 percent cheaper than power from the grid. The company’s new trading platform gives German homeowners a way to both purchase power and sell excess solar power across the utility grid.

25 percent Electricity on its system is 25 percent cheaper than the electricity on the grid, according to the company.

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29 Improbable

Headquarters: London, United Kingdom

Industry: Computing & Communications

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $22 million raised

The company, which came out of work done originally when the founders were students at the University of Cambridge, is developing an environment for building virtual worlds at a new scale and complexity. With advances in robotics and driverless cars, such simulations have become more important as a testing ground. Improbable’s technology allows large amounts of information to be shared between multiple servers nearly instantaneously, which is appealing to gaming developers looking to allow many players to experience a virtual world together.

Funding Andreessen Horowitz is a major backer.

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30 Movidius

Headquarters: San Mateo, California

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $90 million raised

Movidius makes chips for computer-vision applications, which will be necessary to develop smarter mobile devices and drones. Google’s Tango tablet uses Movidius chips, as does DJI’s Phantom 4 drone. Movidius also recently announced a new chip geared for augmented and virtual reality.

On the radar Drones using Movidius technology can sense obstacles to avoid collisions.

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31 Intrexon

Headquarters: Germantown, Pennsylvania

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $3 billion

Its Oxitec division’s genetically engineered mosquito, which yields offspring that die quickly, has been released in Grand Cayman and parts of Brazil in an attempt to reduce the spread of Zika and other diseases. In March, the World Health Organization recommended a pilot deployment of Oxitec’s solution. The company has been buying up companies specializing in synthetic biology in a variety of applications, but it has not been transparent about how its technology works, leading to some negative speculation about the company.

$174 million Acquisitions increased sales from $8 million to $174 million in five years.

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32 Carbon

Headquarters: Redwood City, California

Industry: Energy

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $141 million raised

Carbon has developed a new technique based on stereolithography that it says is as much as 100 times faster than rivals’ 3-D printing methods and fast enough to be used in place of injection molding to produce certain parts. Carbon will face competition from HP, which has its own new printing technology based on a different class of materials. But the startup is backed by some high-powered investors, including Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Silver Lake Kraftwerk, and its board members include the former CEOs of Ford and DuPont.

$40,000 Use of its 3-D printers costs $40,000 a year.

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33 Bosch

Headquarters: Stuttgart, Germany

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $649 billion

Bosch’s vision for an industrial Internet of things starts with manufacturing facilities that are becoming increasingly connected and automated, a way to increase productivity in an era of global competition and relatively high domestic wages. The company estimates that by 2020 technologies like connected assembly lines, predictive maintenance, and machines that can do some self-monitoring will combine to boost company revenue by more than $1 billion while saving a comparable amount in operational expenses.

$80 billion Record revenue generated in 2015.

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34 T2 Biosystems

Headquarters: Lexington, Massachusetts

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $201 million

T2 Biosystems has begun selling its technology for detecting the pathogenic fungus Candida, an often deadly infection. The test is run in three to five hours, as opposed to two to six days, and today 16 hospitals use it.

35 Number of customers who now use the company’s bench-top diagnostic system.

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35 Editas Medicine

Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $1 billion

A pioneer of the controversial and exciting CRISPR gene-editing technology, Editas intends to begin testing a new form of gene repair in humans in 2017. The idea is to use CRISPR to cut out the genetic mutation that causes Leber’s congenital amaurosis, a rare retinal disease that leads to blindness, so the cell can repair itself with a normal version. Though CRISPR technology was invented just a few years ago, it is so precise and cheap to use that it has quickly become a tool in biology laboratories.

$94 million Money raised in its February IPO, and the stock is up 85 percent since then.

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36 Nestlé

Headquarters: Vevey, Switzerland

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $238 billion

Food giant Nestlé has jumped into microbiome research, working to develop “healthy gut” products for its Health Science division. Among its bets on nutritional therapies, the company has made repeated investments in Seres Therapeutics, most recently investing $120 million in the company to support its efforts to develop medicines aimed at the bacteriological balance in the digestive tract. The first experimental treatments are focused on Clostridium difficile infection and inflammatory bowel disease.

$2 billion At a slow time for its core food business, its nutritional therapies division has reached $2 billion in annual revenue in its first five years, and more strong growth is predicted.

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37 RetroSense Therapeutics

Headquarters: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Industry: Biotech

Status: Private

Valuation: not available, $12 million raised

Its therapy uses optogenetics, a technology that uses a combination of gene therapy and light to precisely control nerves. In its treatment of retinitis pigmentosa, the eye is injected with viruses carrying DNA from light-sensitive algae; this is intended to confer light sensitivity on certain nerve cells in the eye.

$12 million Revenue raised from foundations and private investors as well as the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

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38 Line, subsidiary of Naver

Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Private

Valuation: expected to be more than $5 billion

Line’s growth has slowed, but it is still a leader among the world’s messaging apps when it comes to making money from its users. The company steadily introduces new features, such as chatbot functionality for corporate marketing campaigns and group calls for up to 200 people. (In comparison, Skype limits group calls to 25 people.) In its home market of Japan, Line offers taxi booking inside its app and will soon provide phone service through a deal with Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo. Its IPO expected later this year could value the company at more than $5 billion.

218 million Number of monthly active users.

39 TransferWise

Headquarters: London, United Kingdom

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Private

Valuation: $1.1 billion

TransferWise matches people who looking to make currency trades around the world, at much lower fees than traditional institutions. It has already captured 5 percent of the U.K.’s money-transfer market and recently expanded to the U.S., Canada, Japan, and Mexico, among other places. Its goal of disrupting multinational banks and Western Union has attracted investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Richard Branson, among others.

$750 million Money TransferWise helps users exchange every month.

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40 Veritas Genetics

Headquarters: Danvers, Massachusetts

Industry: Biotech

Status: Private

Valuation: Not available

By making whole-genome sequencing and interpretation affordable, Veritas gives patients and doctors a fuller picture than what’s possible with common genetic tests, improving their diagnostic value. The company also offers cancer screening tests for $199 to $299.

$1,000 Whole-genome sequencing, including interpretation and counseling, costs under $1,000. The supply is limited to 5,000 customers in 2016.

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41 FireEye

Headquarters: Milpitas, California

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $2 billion

The company’s security system can be updated at any time to defend against constantly mutating cyber threats. It also encourages clients to focus on quickly resolving attacks, not just trying to avoid them. FireEye has grown to a significant size in an often fragmented Industry:, and it’s been hired to investigate high-profile cybersecurity failures at JPMorgan Chase, Sony Pictures, and Target.

In the works New products focus on securing public and private clouds and detecting targeted e-mail attacks.

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42 SevenBridges

Headquarters: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $45 million raised

Its bioinformatics software platform runs one of the world’s largest genomic data sets, the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genome Atlas. This gives cancer researchers worldwide immediate access to a petabyte of patient data and computational resources to analyze it, facilitating research collaboration. SevenBridges is also storing and analyzing data from the 100,000 genomes collected by the British National Health Service. The company’s long-term vision is to support drug research and the practice of precision medicine customized to each patient.

11,000 Number of patients that have contributed 33 cancer types and subtypes to its Cancer Genomics Cloud.

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43 Slack

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Private

Valuation: $4 billion

In the past year, Slack’s number of daily users increased from 750,000 to three million. During that time, the company rolled out voice calls as a beta feature and launched a directory for third-party apps, an $80 million fund to invest in Slack developers, and a toolkit for creating chatbots. It also introduced a “Sign In with Slack” feature that lets business users sign up for apps using their Slack identity credentials. The momentum helped Slack raise $200 million more in funding, for a current total of $540 million, at a Valuation: of $3.8 billion.

Three million Number of daily active Slack users.

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44 Coupang

Headquarters: Seoul, South Korea

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Private

Valuation: $5 billion

Originally a Groupon clone, Coupang is now widely viewed as the Amazon.com of Korea. Like Amazon, it is betting on same-day delivery as an amenity to lure consumers. It has invested millions in a sophisticated logistics system that spans warehouses, trucks, thousands of delivery people, and proprietary algorithms to link everything together. Coupang is also focused on making it easier and more compelling to buy items via smartphone. The aggressive approach brought in $1 billion in funding from Japan’s SoftBank last year.

$5 billion Coupang’s most recent Valuation:.

45 IBM

Headquarters: Armonk, New York

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $142 billion

IBM remains in turnaround mode. It has suffered 16 consecutive quarters of declining sales but continues to invest in cloud computing and analytics. Part of that investment involves buying up companies such as Truven Health Analytics and the Weather Company. The purchases come with huge data sets IBM can use to train its AI system, Watson.

100 Number of clients that have built Watson into a product.

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46 Snapchat

Headquarters: Los Angeles, California

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Private

Valuation: $20 billion

Snapchat is still experimenting with innovative new content, which was the reason it made this list last year. This year, Snapchat’s most significant moves relate to expanding its advertising business. Advertisers value Snapchat as a way to reach consumers aged 13 to 34, but they have criticized the company for charging high rates without sharing much data about ads’ performance. Snapchat recently addressed these concerns by signing deals that let Viacom sell ads on its behalf and allow Nielsen to supply campaign data to advertisers.

10 billion Number of videos that are seen on the app every day.

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47 Africa Internet Group

Headquarters: Lagos, Nigeria

Industry: Internet & Digital Media

Status: Private

Valuation: $1 billion

Africa Internet Group (AIG) was founded by the German tech incubator Rocket Internet in 2012 and runs an array of e-commerce companies throughout Africa. Its flagship business is the online retailer Jumia, which it says is Africa’s largest e-commerce mall. It also owns the continent’s leading hotel booking portal and classified-ad marketplaces for cars and real estate. Besides Rocket Internet, AIG has funding from Axa, Goldman Sachs, and two large telecommunications companies: MTN Group and Orange. Though it is not yet profitable, investors view AIG as a way to access Africa’s developing online economy

26 Africa Internet Group operates in 26 African countries.

48 LittleBits

Headquarters: New York City, New York

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Private

Valuation: Valuation: not available, $62 million raised

Its mostly open-source building kits are now for sale at Barnes & Noble, and the company has added new executives from Lego and MakerBot.

$299 Basic kits sell for $99 to $299.

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49 Intel

Headquarters: Santa Clara, California

Industry: Computing & Communications

Status: Public

Valuation: $140 billion

Despite its long domination of the PC chip market, Intel has struggled to keep ahead of customer demands, particularly the drive for mobile computing. Now the company is trying to find better footing in new domains such as the cloud and Internet-connected devices, experimenting with reprogrammable processors for deep neural networks, and moving a fundamentally new kind of computer memory to market.

$16.7 billion Money Intel spent to buy Altera, a maker of programmable logic devices.

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50 Monsanto

Headquarters: St. Louis, Missouri

Industry: Biotech

Status: Public

Valuation: $44 billion

Monsanto is using RNA interference to create alternatives to conventional genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Already able to kill bugs by getting them to eat leaves coated with specially designed RNA, the company is now trying to develop sprays that penetrate plant cells to block certain plant genes. Potential applications include ideas like a spray that causes tomatoes to taste better or one that helps plants survive a drought. In May, Bayer made a $62 billion offer for the company, which Monsanto turned down, though management did indicate an openness to discussing further offers.

$1.5 billion Money invested last year in research on new biotech traits, genomics, and more.

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The mission of MIT Technology Review is to equip its audiences with the intelligence to understand a world shaped by technology.

ORIGINAL: Tech Review

June 21, 2016