Red Hat named to Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025

Today, we are proud to announce that Red Hat has been named to Fast Company’s prestigious list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025. Red Hat is ranked #15 in the enterprise category. The 2025 list recognizes 609 organizations across 58 sectors and regions, all businesses that are shaping industry and culture through innovations that set new standards and achieve remarkable milestones in all sectors of the economy.

For context, here’s what Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Brendan Vaughan says about this year’s list:

“Our list of the Most Innovative Companies offers both a comprehensive look at innovation today and a playbook for the future. This year, we recognize companies that are harnessing AI in deep and meaningful ways, brands that are turning customers into superfans by overdelivering for them, and challengers that are introducing bold ideas and vital competition to their industries. At a time when the world is rapidly shifting, these companies are charting the way forward.”

As the leading provider of enterprise open source software, innovation is a constant in our line of work. It started with making Linux the workhorse and innovation engine in the datacenter, then building the dominance of open source technologies in cloud computing, from cloud-native applications and Kubernetes to open source virtualization alternatives and developer tooling.

Now, we’ve trained our focus on the next area of open innovation: AI.

Fast Company recognized Red Hat for the work we’ve done in making AI more accessible to broader sets of users, namely with the InstructLab project. InstructLab helps to lower the barriers around contributing skills and knowledge to an AI model, extending this access from just data scientists to developers, IT operations teams and other domain experts. 

The community behind InstructLab is strong, and we’ve taken this work a step further by productizing InstructLab within Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI) and Red Hat OpenShift AI. This brings a supported, enterprise-ready version of the project to organizations that want to explore and deploy AI strategies in hardened, production environments across the hybrid cloud while using the Linux and Kubernetes tools with which they are already familiar.

We’re honored that this drive has led us to be named as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2025. We believe that AI cannot succeed without open source and the hybrid cloud, and we’re committed to delivering innovations that enable our customers to not only succeed with AI strategies, but thrive.

The full list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies honorees can now be found at fastcompany.com. It will also be available on newsstands beginning March 25.

About Fast Company

Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow business publication Inc. For more information, please visit fastcompany.com.