In recent years, the annual growth rate of the global economy has restabilized to around 3%, according to The Council on Foreign Relations. At the same time, while business is booming, climate change is accelerating, health inequities are widening, and literacy rates and math skills are stagnating or dropping around the world. But turning a profit can come with making a positive societal impact. To identify organizations that have global economic reach (reporting at an annual revenue of at least $250 million in their most recent fiscal year) as well as a net positive impact on the world, TIME partnered with Statista this year to launch the first edition of the World’s Most Impactful Companies list. The data-driven methodology considers how much companies align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and draws on science-based net impact data from The Upright Project—sourced from millions of scientific articles, as well as public statistical databases such as the World Bank, WHO, OECD, IPCC—as a core component of the final scores. The ranking highlights 500 companies that work to address high-priority global challenges as part of their core business—proof that companies can do good and do well. 

Methodology: How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Most Impactful Companies of 2026

The idea of socially responsible investing isn’t new, though international organizations like the United Nations drew attention to the concept in the 2000s and 2010s by creating ESG-based objectives for UN member states, encouraging them to factor these into investments. But those in the finance industry have been pushing back against ESG investing, with critics arguing that it can be subjective, hard to measure, and that it’s not really profitable. 

When Annu Nieminen started The Upright Project in 2017, she noticed that existing sustainability data did not really capture the financial or material impacts of companies’ products. To her, corporate-standard ESG reports were mostly about how companies do what they do, not what they actually get done. This means that companies with core operations that are net negative to the world—like those making tobacco products, fast food, or fast fashion—but are diligent with their reporting and compliance can end up relatively high in a traditional ESG or sustainability ranking, she says. 

Nieminen used her background in mathematics and experience with data modeling for consulting companies to create an algorithm that uses a deep-learning natural language processing architecture to extract causal relationships between products, services, and their impacts based on scientific literature; essentially, it describes how companies turn resources into outcomes of value for people and the planet. Each company is assessed on how much positive or negative impact it has on areas like human physical and mental health, knowledge, and the environment. This is then combined with economic data to produce quantitative estimates of corporate net impact. Although most companies will have some negative trade-offs like land use, emissions from the production process, or side effects incurred during clinical trials testing new medicines, the positive impacts that the companies ranked on this list make far outweigh the negatives that can be a part of business operations. Upright’s model is able to quantify companies’ real-world impacts, independent of what companies report, and by using machine learning, it’s able to compare different types of complex systems, and distinguish what sets two companies in the same category apart.

“So for example, when we look at different pharmaceutical companies…we’re interested in what products, what volume? If there’s a vaccine that’s very affordable, we’re looking at the disability-adjusted life-years that the company is able to save or protect. And we look at their impact for revenue,” Nieminen says. That means a company that has a lot of affordable medicine that is has been scientifically proven to save many lives around the world would rank higher than a pharmaceutical company that is concentrating on a high-price point medication for diseases that impacts a smaller portion of the population, and has a lower impact in terms of adjusted life-years saved.

The top companies on this year’s list have had undeniable impacts on global health: Moderna (no. 1) is a pioneer of mRNA technology and became a vital supplier of COVID vaccines during the pandemic; Bavarian Nordic (no. 2) has donated mpox vaccines to outbreaks in Africa and is currently working to commercialize its chikungunya vaccine in Latin America.

Moderna, founded 2010, reported that the company has returned to profit in a May financial update as four of its products are now commercially approved, including its two different COVID vaccines, its COVID plus flu combination vaccine, and its RSV vaccine. “We built Moderna because we believe mRNA is a very important molecule of life. It’s an information molecule,” says CEO Stéphane Bancel. “At the end of the day, what happens in the cell is just the flow of information.” Moderna came out of the gate with a wide range of medicines, for everything from infectious disease to heart conditions to personalized cancer vaccines, which it’s been developing in partnership with Merck pre-dating the pivot to COVID vaccines. The idea is to take the specific mutations in the DNA of a patient’s cancer, and use that code to construct an individualized chemical medicine. The company just had positive readouts from their melanoma trial in January and is expecting Phase 3 results from their non-small cell lung cancer study later this year. “We’re just expanding the aperture of what we can do with mRNA,” says Bancel. 

For infectious viral diseases, mRNA technology has the advantage of being able to do a strain match, Bancel says, which means it can be adapted to mutations quicker than other vaccines. And from their experience with the COVID vaccine, they were able to replicate the process across other viruses like RSV, with a norovirus vaccine and a flu vaccine candidate in late clinical trials. In 2022, Moderna also launched the mRNA Access program to partner with health organizations, governments, and academic institutions around the world to create a research biobank with genomic and other information for the over 100 viruses around the world that regularly harm humans, including hantaviruses, of which we only have vaccines for around 40. In tangent, the company has also developed a rapid response platform, which is “basically a network of factories, in addition to the academic partnerships, in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia, so that we have the manufacturing capacity so that if there is another pandemic, we could potentially go faster,” Bancel says, “because a lot of heavy lifting has already happened on the science and with the mRNA manufacturing network.” 

At no. 5, Sunrun, one of the biggest developers of residential solar in the U.S., is top ranked in the Utilities and Environmental Services category and has been a winner in the green energy market in part due to its innovative business model of offering solar power as a subscription service (the company installs and manages the upkeep of their panels for a rental fee, lowering the cost for consumers). “We have 1.1 million customers, and 1 million of those are on the subscription model,” says CEO Mary Powell. Another important move is Sunrun’s expansion of their storage technology offerings alongside solar. “We’re now attaching storage in that subscription 73% of the time,” she says. This allows homeowners to “generate their energy, store their energy, and use it to make sure that they have no outages in their home, to make sure that they’re maximizing any kind of complex utility rates. But then we also take that energy and export it back to the grid.”

They’ve partnered with Ford to develop technology through pilot programs that would allow the Ford Lightning owners to back up their home power with their truck’s battery. Sunrun currently operates in around 22 jurisdictions including Puerto Rico. In a distributed power plant program in Puerto Rico last year, Sunrun was able to prevent a blackout of the grid. “We now have 8.6 gigawatts of solar and 4.3 gigawatt hours of storage…Since inception, we’ve saved $1.9 billion of customer savings. Since 2007, we’ve provided 3.9 million backup hours over 1.7 million outages, and, of course, at the same time, avoided emissions in a really significant way,” says Powell. “What we’ve done is the equivalent of taking [around] 69 gas-fired plants offline for a year.”

Powell believes that systems like Sunrun’s will help make the grid affordable for all customers. “This energy crisis is going to make utility rates go up. Dramatic weather events make the cost of the utility power go up,” Powell says. “We serve a lot of low and moderate income Americans across the country, we provide an option for them to have not just a good price but price stability.” 

Nieminen says that Upright’s model has also been able to spotlight industries that may not rank high on ESG lists or get a lot of publicity, like water and sewage system management and infrastructure. “At the end of the day, their way of using resources, making sure that sanitation works in big cities, it’s really hard even to imagine societies without them,” she says. These include Veolia (no. 17), one of the world’s largest water services companies filtering PFAS—“forever chemicals”—from drinking water; Sabesp (no. 11), the largest sanitation company in Brazil; Metawater (no. 19), which supplies pumps, filtration systems, and control equipment to water treatment facilities; and Advanced Drainage Systems (no. 30), which makes the pipes, chambers, and tanks used to collect, store, and drain rainwater and wastewater underground. 

The 172-year-old Veolia, beyond filtering PFAS, has a broader business across water treatment, sanitation, desalination, and pollution management as well as energy. The unifying theme across their different business segments is that they try to extract value from waste. “We are the leader of everything which has to do with the circular economy,” says CEO Estelle Brachlianoff. “With Veolia, there is nothing wasted. Turning waste into a resource, that’s the motto for us.” 

The company uses “circular solutions” to create access to local sources of energy and local sources of materials. That can mean making biogas from the waste they collect, effectively recycling batteries to reuse precious metals, using treated wastewater instead of freshwater to cool data centers, or recouping waste heating to warm homes. It’s working with large electronics manufacturers like TSMC, Micron, Samsung and Intel to minimize their impact on local communities and reduce their use of energy and new resources whenever it’s possible to tap into something circular instead. 

“The more Veolia grows, the more it has a positive impact for our customers, as well as for the planet,” says Brachlianoff. Its strategic plan, GreenUp, focuses on eliminating 18 million metric tons of CO2 from its customers’ carbon footprints and treating 10 million metric tons of hazardous waste by 2027. “When there is a problem, we try and find a solution or invent it,” she says, PFAS treatment being just one recent example. 

The Upright framework’s ability to factor in knowledge as a key outcome for evaluating impact was also important to Nieminen. “Looking at the societal value, we can’t really overlook the impact of knowledge,” she says. On the list are Duolingo (no. 41) and Coursera (no. 183), “both examples of companies that are not necessarily ESG heroes, but they are democratizing learning and are efficient ways of using resources that have a positive knowledge outcome.”

Currently, Upright works with large universities like Wharton and institutional investors like pension funds, asset managers, private investors, that are utilizing data to understand risk profiles of companies and how an asset really impacts the world around it. “Before they show up on your financial analysis, they show up in scientific analysis like this,” Nieminen says. “Typically, if it’s going to have a material impact on human health or biodiversity, there’s going to be a financial implication sooner or later. This is the relevance for this kind of data that wasn’t necessarily understood five years ago.”

See the full list of The World’s Most Impactful Companies of 2026 below: