It found a partner in Meta, which had floated a similar idea back in 2017, and the two companies started collaborating on what would eventually become the Ray-Ban Meta line. Meta brought the technology, which includes a camera, speakers, and integrated AI assistant, while EssilorLuxottica focused on a design that would work within the confines of stylish frames.
The latest version arrived in the fall of 2023, and the line expanded this year with new styles and custom frame-and-lens combos along with additional AI features from Meta. (The AI features continue to roll out: Meta just added AI video capability and real-time language translation functionality.)
EssilorLuxottica says the new models sold more in their first nine months than the originals did in two years, and they’re the top-selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban stores in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The company recently announced that it’s sold 2 million units of the glasses since October 2023 and is gearing up to produce 10 million every year by the end of 2026. Meta and EssilorLuxottica have also extended their partnership into the next decade.
That’s not to say that EssilorLuxottica is tying its tech fate exclusively to Meta. In 2022, it established a smart eyewear lab with Politecnico di Milano, the same year that it acquired Nuance Hearing. The company previewed the first product from the latter effort, a set of glasses with integrated hearing aids, in 2024. They received FDA clearance in February, and they’re planned to ship by the end of Q1.
The glasses amplify sounds in front of the wearer using beamforming technology to make conversations easier and eliminate distractions from ambient noises. And they come, naturally, in two stylish frames.
Read more about EssilorLuxottica, honored as No. 8 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2025.
For engineering a pair of earbuds that don’t tune you out
Not every earbud wearer wants to be disconnected from the outside world, so Bose came up with a clever new design to let the sound in. The Bose Ultra Open Earbuds clip to the side of your ear and project sound into the ear canal. This keeps the inner ear free of any uncomfortable intrusions and lets wearers hear what’s happening around them without having to rely on external microphones and special transparency modes.
Open earbuds are an area of increasing interest for audio brands, though none has put quite the same emphasis on all-day comfort. New models from Monster, Nothing, and Earfun are larger and rest over the ears, while Sony’s latest LinkBuds Open earbuds rest inside the ear, with a hole to let outside sound through. Some open-ear headphones, such as Shokz’s bone conduction models, even wrap around the back of the head.
While Bose’s unique design is starting to draw more direct imitations—most notably from Anker’s Soundcore C30i buds—reviews give a clear nod to the Ultra Open Earbuds for comfort and sound quality, carving out a leadership position in a growing category.
For bringing the barbecue indoors
Too many smart kitchen appliances promise to make cooking simpler, only to add new layers of complication. GE Appliances’ Profile Smart Indoor Smoker offers something more tangible, allowing you to eat delicious smoked meat without having to step outside.
At 16-by-17-by-20 inches, the $1,000 device is compact enough to fit on a countertop but large enough to contain a few racks of ribs or an entire brisket when split among top and bottom racks. It uses real wood pellets for smoke, which then passes through a filtration system akin to a catalytic converter to avoid smoking up the house. A companion app lets you tweak temperatures and monitor the meat’s doneness through internal probes.
This is the only product of its kind, and it enables a type of cuisine that would otherwise require an outdoor appliance. Reviews have praised the product, albeit with reservations about what it means for barbecue as a hobby. Tasting the results, Texas Monthly called them both “delicious” and “sacrilegious.”
For dreaming up a well-designed pair of sleep earbuds
When Bose discontinued its svelte Sleepbuds in 2023, a group of former employees decided to carry the torch, licensing Bose’s IP to make earbuds to help people sleep better. Ozlo’s Sleepbuds, which launched in October 2024, have the same comfy design as their predecessors, so they’re compact and squishy enough even for side sleepers, and they can play a night’s worth of ambient sound to mask a partner’s snores or other outside sounds.
But Ozlo’s version does a lot more than Bose’s original. It supports Bluetooth audio from a phone and detects when you’ve fallen asleep, so it can switch from a podcast or audiobook over to its own ambient sounds. The earbuds case also has its own built-in sensors for light, noise, and temperature, so they can report on outside disturbances that might be affecting your sleep.
Ozlo’s not stopping there. In October, the company raised $12 million to develop a second-generation model. It’s also trying to gain FDA clearance for tinnitus therapy, as it believes its earbuds are already helpful for the 10% of Americans suffering from it.
For turning small breakthroughs into a bigger, visionary one
Apple’s Vision Pro is the perfect example of how the company’s smaller innovations tend to snowball over time. Yes, the product itself is a spare-no-expense luxury—a $3,500 headset whose visual fidelity and ability to see through to the real world far exceed that of any competitor—and it’s clearly aimed at bleeding-edge early adopters and app developers right now. But it also taps into frameworks and features that were years in the making on other Apple products.
For instance, it builds on Apple’s existing ARKit framework, allowing developers of augmented reality iPhone apps to reuse many of the assets, and it uses the same Quick Look technology to pin virtual objects persistently in the real world. It also builds on content-sharing feature Sidecar to bring a Mac display into virtual space and SharePlay to experience apps with faraway friends. In February, Apple announced that it was bringing its Apple Intelligence AI features to the headset. Meanwhile, the hardware provides a starting point for Apple to build new kinds of content partnerships. (One intriguing possibility: Apple is in talks with Real Madrid to offer virtual seats at live matches.)
Apple hasn’t revealed sales figures for the Vision Pro, but rumors suggest the company is working on more affordable variants. Its steady iterations will ensure that it has plenty of apps and content waiting when that happens.
For making a more practical smart ring, especially for women
Oura didn’t need to reinvent the wheel for its fourth-generation health-tracking ring. Instead, it made significant refinements to extend its lead in the category it helped pioneer. The Oura Ring 4 uses recessed sensors instead of raised sensor bumps to improve comfort, and it packs additional signal pathways—more than twice as many as the previous model—to improve accuracy. It also comes in more sizes than before, has longer battery life, and adds new features, such as daytime stress tracking.
The company has been positioning its device to give women, in particular, more insight into their health. It now tracks 30 different markers, including the new Fertile Window, which estimates fertile days, chance of conception at that time, and detected day of ovulation, giving women more information about their chances of getting pregnant throughout their cycle. In addition, it now offers a Pregnancy Insights report that tracks gestational age and provides weekly updates about physiological changes.
Smart rings are a category of growing interest, with Samsung entering the fray this year, but Oura is in a strong position. The company announced in June that it’s sold more than 2.5 million rings and that 59% of its wearers identify as female. That’s a shift from a year ago, when most wearers were men. It also raised $200 million in a Series D round in December.
For tackling wireless charging’s silent battery killer
Wireless phone charging is convenient, but it tends to generate heat, which can hinder the charging process and harm the battery’s long-term health. ESR’s CryoBoost tech aims to solve the problem by putting a fan and cooling ducts around the charger, activating them automatically when an iPhone is placed on top.
ESR first introduced CryoBoost in 2022, and this year it unveiled a new open duct design that further improves charging efficiency while reducing noise. It also supports the Qi2 wireless magnetic charging standard, which Android phones will be able to use in the future. ESR says the new design reduces phone temperatures while charging by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit compared to conventional wireless chargers.
While ESR doesn’t break out CyroBoost sales in particular, the company is on the rise as an accessory maker, with 92% annual revenue growth in 2024, total revenues of $290 million, and 17 million products sold.
For lowering one of birding’s barriers
Big tech companies are racing to bring augmented reality into everyday life, but Swarovski Optik has a much narrower use case in mind. Its AX Visio binoculars, which launched in 2024, can identify thousands of birds around the world though an onboard database that works without an internet connection. They can also identify mammals, dragonflies, and butterflies in Europe and North America.
The binoculars also have a smart way of sharing discoveries with fellow observers: You can mark them in the viewfinder, then hand the binoculars over, and they’ll point the other person in the direction of the finding. Meanwhile, a companion app logs the exact location of those discoveries for future reference.
The concept is impressive on its own, but Swarovski also sees AX Visio as a platform for future augmentations. It offers an API for developers to bolt on new capabilities and even has two unassigned spots on its function wheel to allow for additional feature expansions. The binoculars are pricey at $4,800, but in the long run they could change how birders and other budding nature enthusiasts interact with the hobby.
For making a bold bet on TV brightness
Unlike most flagship TVs, which use OLED display technology, Sony’s top-shelf Bravia 9 TV uses Mini-LED. TV makers typically view Mini-LED as a step downward, because it can’t achieve the same deep black levels as OLED, but Sony has come up with a new backlighting system that reduces the blooming of Mini-LED while achieving much higher peak brightness levels.
For Sony, the shift isn’t just about winning the tech spec war. It’s also a top purveyor of mastering monitors for movie and TV studios, and last year it introduced a model that supports significantly higher brightness across the entire screen. As editors take advantage of these new monitors, the hope is that TVs like the Bravia 9 will bring what you see at home even closer to what creators intended.
For building a more sustainable—and privacy-focused—smart home system
Home Assistant has long been the platform of choice for DIY smart home enthusiasts who value privacy and control, but now it’s on a stronger footing than ever. This year, its backers formed a new nonprofit called the Open Home Foundation to shepherd the project, and it’s taken some big steps to make the platform more approachable to newbies.
You can now buy Home Assistant’s simple smart home device on Amazon, for instance. A privacy-focused voice assistant device to rival Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Nest debuted in December. (The group also established a “Wake Word Collective” to help train the voice assistant, which will work entirely offline.) Home Assistant has been cleaning things up on the software side as well, with a redesigned smart home dashboard, Apple CarPlay support, and an overhauled Music Assistant for controlling music from streaming services or a local file collection. It’s still primarily a platform for geeks, but it’s getting easier for anyone to adopt.
Explore the full 2025 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 609 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the companies making the biggest impact across 58 categories, including advertising, applied AI, biotech, retail, sustainability, and more.
This post originally appeared at fastcompany.com
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