Change the World
When the Fortune Change the World list made its debut in 2015, the business world was beginning an unprecedented pivot—publicly embracing social responsibility. Widening income inequality, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–09, and a growing awareness of climate change had made the public increasingly skeptical of businesses’ motives. CEOs responded with commitments to do better for people and the planet. “Stakeholder capitalism” was in; pure profit-seeking was out.
Since then, as society has become more polarized, it’s gotten harder for business leaders to highlight efforts like these; some critics dismiss them as lip service, while others deride them as “woke.” But our list has spotlighted hundreds of companies that let their actions speak for them—harnessing the creative impulses of capitalism to address social problems, and generating revenue while doing so. This year’s edition, our 10th, showcases 52 businesses that continue that legacy, selected by our reporters and editors from a short list of about 250. This year, we've once again arranged some of those companies into supergroups—clusters of two or three companies that are having important impacts in closely related fields. That’s the case for our No. 1 entry, the three companies launching “Satellites for a Better Planet, ”as well as No. 7 (“Tech Educators”), No. 18 (“Energy Innovators”), and two others.
With 2024 on track to be the warmest year on record, environmental impact remains a central focus of our list. And companies that are creatively deploying AI make a major mark on this year’s roster—as do the companies training young people, by the hundreds of thousands, to use it well. You’ll find these innovators and many more on this year's Change the World list.
The Top Ten
Satellites for a Better Planet (GHGSat, Rocket Lab, SpaceX)
Aerospace & Defense
Humanity has filled the sky with artificial stars. Sometime this June, according to astronomers, we reached the milestone of 10,000 active satellites in orbit. Most of those satellites are pointed back at earth, and some have the potential to do a world of good. Satellites can help businesses sharply curb emissions of gasses linked to climate change; indeed, they can spot leaks of carbon dioxide and methane that can only be recognized from high above the earth’s surface. Montreal-based GHGSat (“GHG” stands for “greenhouse gas”) developed some of the first sensors designed to measure such emissions; its images offer far higher resolution than those from most government-run climate satellites. The company launched its first satellite in 2016, and now operates a “constellation” of a dozen. In recent years, GHGSat has helped authorities stop massive methane leaks from oil pipelines in Turkmenistan and a landfill in Madrid. In 2023, the company performed over 3 million observations of industrial facilities and other sites, helping prevent about 6 million metric tons of CO2 emissions from reaching the atmosphere (the equivalent of taking 1.4 million cars off the road). By 2026, GHGSat hopes to have at least 40 satellites in orbit, enough to monitor every major industrial site worldwide, every day.Launching a do-gooder satellite can be prohibitively expensive, but private-sector entrepreneurs have done a lot to bring those costs down. Long Beach, Calif.–based Rocket Lab is one of only two companies that are regularly launching reusable payload vehicles (the other is Elon Musk’s SpaceX). Rocket Lab’s Electron is designed to carry the smaller satellites that growing numbers of scientists, companies, and governments rely on, and its prices are correspondingly low: The average launch costs $8.2 million. (A launch of SpaceX’s much bigger Falcon 9 rocket costs about $67 million.) NASA relied on the Electron to deploy its Tropics satellites, which help meteorologists track hurricanes more accurately—enabling more people to get an early warning and reach safety. Rocket Lab has helped launch 190 satellites, many of them involved in environmental monitoring, and it now boasts a $1 billion order backlog. By sheer numbers, the world’s satellite Goliath is Starlink: Of those 10,000 satellites, about two-thirds belong to SpaceX’s high-speed internet service. Starlink now has more than 3 million customers, and analysts estimate it will generate $6.6 billion in revenue in 2024. Starlink has kept communication lines open when war and conflict have isolated people—supporting civilians in Ukraine and Sudan, and helping dissidents in Iran access censored media. But its far greater impact has come in extending broadband internet to huge swaths of the world where access was previously wildly expensive or physically impossible, including much of South America and sub-Saharan Africa. That makes Starlink one of the most important bridges across the digital divide.
Grab Holdings
Internet Services and Retailing
Grab may be best known in the U.S. as the ride-hailing service that pushed Uber out of Southeast Asia. But it’s also a super app that connects hundreds of thousands of gig workers and merchants in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other markets. And more recently, Grab’s financial services division has been helping more of those people build greater economic stability.Since 2019, the division has issued loans to drivers and small- and medium-size vendors whose variable income would make them unlikely to get financing from banks and other traditional lenders. Grab judges the borrowers’ creditworthiness based on data from transactions on the app. It says one in three of its active driver partners uses its credit service, to meet funding needs as varied as phone or motorcycle replacements, weddings, or their children’s education. Merchants, meanwhile, take it up to ease cash-flow needs. Grab disbursed $1.5 billion in loans in 2023, up 57% from the previous year.
Viettel Group
Telecommunications
In 2008, only about 24% of Vietnam’s population had access to the internet—and schools, in particular, were suffering from its absence. Telecom conglomerate Viettel has sought to change that through its Educational Network Connection program, in partnership with Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training. The company has provided fiber-optic service to over 46,000 educational institutions across Vietnam and in 10 other countries, and over 25 million students, pupils, and teachers have benefited.
Maven Clinic
Health Care: Pharmacy and Other Services
The U.S. trails most other wealthy nations in maternal health metrics; Maven aims to close the gap. The company partners with employers and health plans to help members get faster, on-demand access to specialists whose fields include maternal care, fertility treatments, reproductive health, and abortion care. Maven now has more than 2,000 corporate clients. The company’s menopause care program reached more than 1 million people at 150 companies within weeks of its launch.
Ello Technology
Computer Software
Millions of American children are unable to read proficiently at their grade level, and education interruptions at the height of COVID-19 set many of them back even further. After watching her own daughter struggle with reading instruction during the pandemic distance-learning era, child psychologist Elizabeth Adams teamed up with two partners in 2020 to cofound Ello, with the aim of using artificial intelligence to make one-on-one reading tutorials easily available. Ello uses generative AI to create books—more than 700 titles so far—that kids from kindergarten through third grade can access via a mobile or tablet app. The app uses speech-recognition AI to listen to and coach children as they read aloud. The startup says about 30,000 kids have read upwards of 600,000 books from its growing library, with larger-than-average shares of those readers coming from lower-income households or homes with non-English-speaking parents—households that would otherwise struggle to find or afford tutoring.
+30 spots