Logistics, a $76 trillion industry still reliant on antiquated technology, has attracted a fleet of modernizing startups. Enable stands out by focusing on an arcane but valuable niche: the B2B rebates that accompany contracts between retailers, distributors, and manufacturers. (Rebates are an essential tool for manufacturers to incentivize buyer loyalty; in some cases, they are a manufacturer’s largest expense.) Enable’s software replaces the Excel files that govern rebate accou
This Canadian space services shop spent 2023 lining up big projects across its satellite and robotics businesses. In August, the global satellite operator Telesat selected MDA Space as its primary satellite provider for the new Telesat Lightspeed low Earth orbit (LEO) services, a contract worth more than $1.5 billion. Telesat will be the first customer to use MDA Space’s new “digital satellite” product, which can provide more beams of data per satellite—enabling re
In 2022, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stalled in the mud north of Kyiv, the world witnessed the unglamorous importance of equipment maintenance: The military column couldn’t proceed because of faulty parts in the tanks and trucks.
The U.S. military has persistent maintenance headaches, too: A 2022 GAO study found that over the last decade, 26 types of aircraft (among them the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jets and all of the Navy’s C-130s transport planes)
Through genomic sequencing and analytics, Sacramento-based Personalis aims to make detection of cancer ever more precise and timely. In October 2023, the company launched early access to its NeXT Personal Dx test, which offers ultra-sensitive circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) detection, enabling earlier detection of cancer recurrence and more detailed monitoring of treatment response.
NeXT Personal Dx is a whole-genome sequencing test that detects circulating tumor DNA molecules, findin
The Canadian commercial AI startup Cohere doesn’t get as much time in the spotlight as OpenAI and Anthropic, but it spent 2023 quietly establishing itself as an attractive API for enterprises. Part of the company’s 2023 success owes to its go-to-market approach. It allows enterprises to host a Cohere language model on their own servers or in a private or commercial cloud.
Last July, Amazon Web Services started to distribute the Cohere models through its Bedrock AI plat
The way we search the web—picking through a list of links, some of them paid for, some gamed to show up high on the page—has remained virtually unchanged for more than two decades. Then came AI chatbots, which can understand plain-language questions and return direct answers, potentially reshuffling the $110 billion search ad business now dominated by Google. One-year-old Perplexity’s “answer engine” is at the forefront of this new world of chatbot-ass
Inserting an IV catheter is among the most common hospital procedures, yet up to half of them fail. This can lead to patients getting the wrong dose or cause scarring and nerve damage.
Extreme cases of complications from incorrectly placed IVs can lead to amputation and even death. While hospitals use continuous monitoring for patients’ heart rates and blood-oxygen levels, it hasn’t been standard practice to continuously monitor IV sites to ensure that patients receive
Last June, U.K.-based mortgage broker Habito made an unusual move: It hired a new CEO who simultaneously became the startup’s biggest shareholder. Ying Tan, an entrepreneur who previously led mortgage advice startup Dynamo, invested his own money in Habito as he took the reins. At the time, 7-year-old Habito was struggling to turn a profit despite its focus on frustrated and overwhelmed first-time homebuyers—a population that is growing in the U.K., as in the United States. Habi
Relay Payments develops fintech products that make on-the-road transactions easier for truck drivers. While the company is most known among haulers for an app that lets them securely charge and accept digital payments for “lumper fees”—the cost of loading and unloading cargo, typically paid upfront—it recently set its sights on making gas fill-ups safer, too. In June 2023, Relay partnered with several truck stop brands, including Pilot Company and its 800 locations
A decade ago, creating a successful online multiplayer game required a large company’s worth of expertise to handle networking, graphics, and marketing and distribution—the list goes on. This year, one of the top-selling PC games, Lethal Company, was developed and released by an individual known only as Zeekerss.
Zeekerss stands on the shoulders of giants, of course: They built their co-op sci-fi horror game using the sophisticated Unity game engine, and distributed it