Cellular agriculture--the production of food and other goods from cells cultured in a lab or factory--has the potential to transform the world's food systems. That can't happen fast enough when it comes to the oceans, where virtually every major fishery is dangerously overexploited, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. After studying biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and working as cancer researchers at hospitals in New York City, Mike Selden and Brian Wyrwas got the idea to bring emerging cell-ag techniques to bear on this problem. They relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area and enrolled in IndieBio, an accelerator for biotech startups. In September 2017, they finally got to taste the first fruits of their labors: carp croquettes whose main ingredient was cultured from stem cells. By the end of 2019, they hope to have a commercially available product consisting of fish cells bound together by food enzymes. Selden says it will be "a lot like the tuna mash for a spicy tuna roll. It's still fish. It's just fish cells that aren't in the shape people are used to having them in." The latter, something more akin to a fish fillet, requires more sophisticated tissue engineering and is likely two years off, he says. --Jeff Bercovici

While working at a software company in her early 20s, Mathilde Collin had a realization. Every type of software she could think of had evolved in some way over the previous decade, except for the one she and her co-workers used the most: email. In 2013, she took that notion to European startup studio eFounders, where she met fellow Parisian Laurent Perrin. Just months later, the French duo co-founded Front, a San Francisco-based software company that has amassed $79 million of funding in less than five years and tripled its revenue every year since 2014.

Collin and Perrin define Front as a "shared inbox for teams"--a modernized version of email that pulls disparate communication channels like Outlook, Slack, Salesforce, social media, and text messages into one platform. Managers can assign employees to handle specific conversations without the hassle of cc's and bcc's, and teams can group-edit messages in real time before they're sent. Collin believes Front can affect a fundamental part of modern life--after all, everyone uses email. "We have an entry point to deeply change how people work," she says, before pausing to acknowledge, "It's an incredibly ambitious thing to do." --Cameron Albert-Deitch

As teenagers in the Netherlands, Jobert Abma and Michiel Prins hacked into the high school TV station. When they were in college, they told an education software company that its platform leaked grades and personal data. In 2012, Alex Rice, then Facebook’s head of product security, challenged them to find a vulnerability. They did, scored a contract with Facebook, and started hacking into Twitter, Spotify, and Uber to win work from them, too. Along with Merijn Terheggen and Rice, they started HackerOne in 2012, to run “bug bounty” programs--which reward hackers for finding security flaws--for Starbucks, GM, Uber, the U.S. Department of Defense, and about 1,000 other organizations. Such customers pay subscriptions, costing from the low four figures to tens of thousands per year. --Will Yakowicz

When Siqi Mou was in college, she suffered from acne and other skin conditions. Her friends recommended over-the-counter products they liked--but none worked. "Why is there no personalized solution?" Mou remembers thinking. Later, when she was a news anchor in Indonesia, a skin care company asked her to star in an ad. She turned it down after learning the products were loaded with harsh chemicals. Her frustrations led to HelloAva, which creates personalized skin care regimens. Users answer questions about their skin via chatbot, attach a selfie, and receive recommendations. (They can also consult with an aesthetician.) The company takes a cut of online sales made through its platform. "If I had never gone through this experience" of having bad skin, says Mou, a concert pianist who once performed on the Great Wall of China, "I would have never figured this out." --Emily Canal

Alexander Harmsen has been interested in aviation since he was a teenager. "I got my pilot's license before I even got my driver's license," says Harmsen, who was 17 when he started flight training. Now, along with his college friend James Howard, he wants to help drones pilot themselves, without humans having to dictate every move. Their company, Iris Automation, uses the same technology that's propelling driverless cars--and they think it'll be revolutionary for a variety of industries. 

One current use-case is inspecting railway lines for targeted maintenance. Harmsen says that the company has roughly two dozen clients in five countries. Due to strict regulations, "every single drone that's flown right now has to have a pilot and a visual observer with their hands on some sort of remote control," which limits the drone's flight to about a mile. That changes when you have a full-fledged "sense and avoid" system like the one Iris Automation is building. --Sonya Mann