HOPE Hydration named Fast Company Most Innovative Companies 2025

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Fast Company

03-18-2025MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES 2025‍

The most innovative companies with 50 or fewer employees for 2025

Here's why these 10 companies ranked atop Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies with 50 or fewer employees in 2025.

BY Sunshine Flint

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4. Hope Hydration

For popularizing smarter drinking fountains

The necessity of removing plastic water bottles from oceans, rivers and streams, and landfills is a given today. Hope Hydration sells and installs smart-city water refill stations that provide free, chilled, and filtered water in stadiums, international airports, and during live entertainment and sporting events. Hope installs and maintains the stations at no cost, but it turns the electronic screens above its stations into mini billboards, selling spots to advertisers (and offering venues a cut of the revenue). The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport installed Hope’s stations in June 2024 and hit 1 million refills by December.

Hope’s behind-the-scenes dashboard, meanwhile, offers venues and airports data about which stations are being used. In 2024, Hope Hydration stations were also installed Wollman Rink in New York’s Central Park, Cannes Lions festival in France, Coachella, and Serena Williams’s WYN Beauty launch. Additionally, the company used a portion of its earned revenue to fund the cleanup of more than 10,000 pounds of plastic around the world. Currently, it achieves 250,000 refills per month, which is a 150x increase since January 2024.

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