What does innovation look like in 2025? From AI to autonomous vehicles, one company keeps setting the bar higher. This is the third year Fortune has published its list of America’s Most Innovative Companies, and for the third year in a row, Alphabet has come out on top.
The conglomerate and parent company of Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., is led by CEO Sundar Pichai. In a February speech at the AI Action Summit in Paris, Pichai said, “[The] opportunity to improve lives and transform things is why Google has been investing in AI for more than a decade.”
Alphabet has journeyed even deeper into the AI space since we published last year’s list, introducing Gemini 2.0 in December 2024 and, more recently, the third version of its open AI model Gemma, after DeepSeek shook up the AI world. Google brought AI Overviews to its search function and debuted Project Astra, an AI agent developed by Google DeepMind that can answer questions and interact with a user’s real environment. Plus, Alphabet drove Waymo, its autonomous vehicles unit, into more cities across the U.S.
The company also owns YouTube, Waze, and Fitbit, among other businesses, and invests in startups through Google Ventures.
Alphabet is joined at the top by Microsoft at No. 2 and Apple in third, which flipped spots from last year’s ranking. Adobe and Cisco cracked the top 10 this year, while Verizon and Dell lost their respective No. 7 and No. 10 spots from last year. Verizon fell to No. 21, and Dell dropped to No. 14. The rest of this year’s top 10—IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, Amazon, and Nike—is the same as the year before, with some movement in ranking within the group.
Adobe’s jump up this year was impressive; it sits at No. 9, after ranking 39 out of 200 in 2024. Like many companies on this list, the creative software developer has embraced AI, launching its family of generative-AI products, Adobe Firefly, in March 2023. The San Jose–based company continued to update these models over the past year, demonstrating continued product innovation. According to the company, Firefly was 2024’s “most popular AI image generation model designed for safe commercial use.”
The 300 companies on this year’s list brought in over $12.6 trillion in revenue for the latest 12 months, with the median revenue figure at $22 billion. A total of 185 of the companies, which represent 17 different sectors, are on the Fortune 500, and 209 are Fortune 1000 companies. Forty-three companies, or 14.3% of the list, have female CEOs, a higher ratio than the Fortune 500, which is around 11%. The majority of companies on the 2025 list are based in California, in line with the previous years’ lists. And while the top three companies are all in the technology sector, health care made up a bigger portion of this year’s list than any other sector, with 63 companies represented.
The Most Innovative Companies list, powered by Statista, takes both hard data and opinions from employees and experts into consideration, looking at three categories: product innovation, process innovation, and innovation culture. Each of these categories accounts for a third of a company’s total score.
While they certainly don’t tell the whole story, patents can provide insight into a company’s product innovation. The total strength of a company’s patent portfolio was one of the key metrics used in overall scoring, with patent data provided by LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions.
In fiscal year 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted 346,152 patents, according to Statista. IBM was America’s patent leader in 2023, with 3,953 granted, per OnDeck. The hardware and software company, based in Armonk, N.Y., ranked fourth on this year’s list and is No. 63 on the Fortune 500. Its dominance is worth noting given that in 2020, the company announced that it would no longer make pursuing the “most patents” title an explicit company goal, after wearing the crown from 1993 to 2021.
Second in terms of most patents earned in 2023 is Qualcomm, No. 19 on this year’s Most Innovative Companies list and No. 117 on the Fortune 500; it was granted 3,886 patents. Notably, the semiconductor and wireless technology developer jumped up significantly on our list this year, after ranking at 147 on last year’s list of 200 companies. Alphabet secured 2,579 patents, closely followed by Apple with 2,568 patents granted.
A few companies new to the list this year that made it to the top 50 are AMD (No. 32), Microchip Technology (No. 43), and Visa (No. 50).
