With more than 50 million
users and another 1 million
joining each month, fitness
social network Strava—which
allows runners, cyclists, and other ath-
letes to upload and share workout stats
and routes—knows all the best trails and
circuits. But instead of selling targeted
ads, the company makes money through
premium subscriptions that include ser-
vices to help users reach training goals
and analyze health data. Strava also sells
access to the world’s largest anonymousactive transportation data set to city plan-
ners, who use it to make “cities better for
cycling and running so more people can
participate,” says Strava cofounder and
CEO Michael Horvath. At the end of last
year, Strava updated its Metro tool, making
it easier for local governments to discover
the most popular bike and walking com-
muter routes. London, Helsinki, and sev-
eral U.S. states’ transportation departments
use Metro to help improve existing infra-
structure, such as identifying where bike
racks would encourage more ridership.FOR HELPING
COMPANIES COMPLY
WITH EVOLVING
DATA-PRIVACY RULES29
3
(^0) Big companies often
maintain huge
troves of customer
data, and small mis-
takes can jeopardize
privacy and legal
compliance. Immuta
builds software to
help businesses gov-
ern, share, and work
with data while
adhering to privacy
laws, such as the
EU’s General Data
Protection Regula-
tion. “The core value
of our platform is to
protect the data and
then unlock it when
employees need it,
without having to
have everyone meet
in the boardroom,”
says cofounder
and CEO Matthew
Carroll. The software
determines who can
access what infor-
mation for what
purpose—allowing
doctors to retrieve
patient records dur-
ing a drug trial, for
example, but hiding
identifying data
from drug compa-
nies when they study
the aggregated
results. When laws
and regulations are
passed (such as the
2018 California Con-
sumer Privacy Act),
Immuta updates its
software to comply.
In 2019, the com-
pany added fea-
tures enabling
organizations to
merge data and
adjust access in
emergencies. The
five-year-old com-
pany nearly tripled
revenue and cus-
tomer count in 2019,
signing on Daimler,
Cerberus, and
Flatiron Health.
MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES 2020
Bra MARCH/APRIL 2020
tisl
av^
Mi
len
kov
ic^ (
Str
ava
)
If your literary tastes run
toward lesbian hockey
romances, zombie
shark mysteries, or
futuristic werewolf dra-
mas, Wattpad has a title
for you. The digital plat-
form directs its 80 mil-
lion monthly readers to
stories from its 4 million
self-published authors
with help from machine
learning, which catego-
rizes all this content.
The company tapped
these insights last year
to launch the Wattpad
Books imprint and pub-
lish its first print titles,
including teen drama
I’m a Gay Wizard and
Afrofuturist romance
Given. Cofounder and
CEO Allen Lau credits
Wattpad readers with
helping to surface
“stories that you
wouldn’t see in tradi-
tional systems.” A simi-
lar approach powers
Wattpad Studios, the
company’s film and
television arm, which
produced After, one of
2019’s highest-grossing
indie films. It has about
40 more projects in
development.
FOR MAINSTREAMING
NICHE STORIES
31
FOR USING
DATA TO P U T
ATHLETES FIRST