TIME, in partnership with Statista, the leading global provider of market and consumer data and rankings, presents the first edition of the “World's Most Impactful Companies” ranking. This quantitative study identifies the companies with the greatest positive impact on the world, combining the quality of their impact with the scale of their economic reach. This ranking is based on a rigorous, data-driven methodology that draws on science-based net impact data from The Upright Project, which serves as a core component of the final score.
Methodology
The company universe combines listed and unlisted companies into a single, global dataset. The listed company universe was anchored to a broad global equity index fund representing approximately 98% of the global investable equity opportunity set across developed, emerging, and frontier markets. The unlisted side was compiled through systematic desktop research combining the highest-revenue non-listed companies and the highest-valuation private companies (unicorns and equivalent).
After deduplication and matching against The Upright Project's database, the final universe comprised approximately 9,900 companies, of which roughly 65% are publicly listed and 35% are privately held.
To be considered for the ranking, a company must meet the following criteria:
- Revenue threshold: The company must report annual revenue of at least USD 250 million based on the most recent available fiscal year, restricting the universe to companies large enough to produce meaningful, reliably measurable net impact at a global scale.
- Positive net impact: The company must demonstrate a positive overall net impact across all assessed dimensions as calculated by Net Impact Model, guaranteeing that every ranked company creates more good than harm in aggregate.
- Data coverage: A company must have sufficient data coverage within The Upright Project’s model and in terms of revenue to enable a reliable impact assessment. Companies with incomplete or insufficient data are excluded to maintain the integrity of the results.
Data Sources and Collection
The ranking draws on multiple complementary data sources to ensure breadth, accuracy, and scientific grounding.
- Impact data: All impact-related and sustainability-related data used in this study was produced by The Upright Project. The Upright Project is an impact data company focused on equipping investors, customers, employees, and companies with science-based impact data to enable informed decision-making. Their quantitative Net Impact Model integrates information from a wide variety of sources (see a full list here), most importantly more than 300 million scientific articles, as well as public statistical databases from the World Bank, WHO, OECD, IPCC, and others. The model uses a deep-learning natural language processing architecture to extract causal relationships between products, services, and their impacts from the scientific literature, and consolidates this information with economic data to produce quantitative estimates of corporate net impact.
- Revenue data: Statista analyzed data on revenue obtained from publicly available sources (e.g., annual reports and company websites) and databases. Revenue figures are used exclusively as a scaling factor in the scoring model.
- Industry classification: Companies have been categorized according to their business activities using Statista’s proprietary internal industry classification system. This classification reflects the primary commercial activities of each company and is independent of any third-party taxonomy.
Impact Assessment Framework
The ranking is constructed using two primary dimensions: Impact Intensity and Company Size (measured by revenue). Impact Intensity is the primary driver of the ranking, while size serves as a moderating—but not dominating—component.
Impact Intensity
Impact Intensity evaluates a company’s impact through two complementary lenses, combined in a weighted composite.
- Net Impact Sum (70% weight): The Net Impact Sum addresses how efficiently a company creates value relative to the resources it consumes and the negative impact it causes. It comprehensively assesses 19 categories across four dimensions: Environment, Health, Society, and Knowledge. Each dimension captures both positive and negative impacts. To ensure comparability across diverse types of impact, The Upright Project utilizes an economic cost-benefit model that translates all impacts into monetary value using data from the World Bank, IMF, WHO, and other leading institutions. This allows for a clear calculation of a company’s net contribution to the world.
- SDG Alignment (30% weight): The SDG component evaluates how closely a company’s core activities align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the global consensus on the most pressing challenges humanity must address. In a world of finite resources, critical tipping points, and tight timelines, even being “net positive” is not sufficient; companies must address the most high-priority global challenges to be considered truly impactful. While the Net Impact Sum establishes whether a company is net positive, the SDG layer rewards companies tackling the world’s most urgent challenges, correcting for potential bias toward activities where high impact efficiency has already been achieved and highlighting sectors that are fundamentally important for sustainable development.
Company Size
Revenue serves as a scaling factor to ensure that the ranking reflects not only the quality of a company's impact but also the scale at which that impact is delivered. The influence of revenue on the final score is controlled by a scaling parameter (beta=0.3), which ensures that company size moderates the ranking without dominating it. Larger companies receive a measured uplift for delivering impact at scale, but a smaller company with a substantially higher Impact Intensity score can still rank above a larger peer.
Scoring Model
The final score for each company combines two components: Impact Intensity as the primary driver and Company Size as a moderating factor. Impact Intensity is calculated as a weighted composite of the Net Impact Sum (NIS, weighted at 70%) and SDG Alignment (SDG, weighted at 30%), both rescaled to a common range. Company Size is measured by annual revenue (Rev) and enters the formula through a logarithmically compressed Revenue Factor, normalized to a 0–1 scale and raised to the power of the scaling parameter β=0.3.
The logarithmic compression reflects the economic principle of diminishing marginal returns to scale preventing very large companies from dominating the ranking purely because of their scale. As a result, a company needed both a strong impact profile and sufficient economic reach to place highly. A large company could not compensate for weak impact performance through size alone, and a smaller company with excellent impact intensity would not automatically reach the top positions if its overall reach remained limited.
Combining all components, the Final Score is computed as: Final Score=(NISnorm+SDGnorm)×Revnorm β
Companies are ranked in descending order of their Final Score. The 500 companies with the highest Final Scores that satisfy all eligibility criteria are recognized as the World's Most Impactful Companies of 2026.
Disclaimer: This ranking contains impact-related and sustainability-related indicators that are based on data produced by Upright Oy (The Upright Project). Statista has applied its own proprietary scoring to derive the final ranking positions; therefore, the ranking does not represent a direct reproduction of The Upright Project's raw data output. Due to the inherent complexity of quantifying net impact across global value chains and the evolving nature of the underlying scientific and statistical sources, the produced information includes a degree of estimation uncertainty. The Upright Project continuously seeks to improve the accuracy of its indicators by using the best available information and the best available statistical methods for integrating information from different sources. The Upright Project does not warrant the accuracy of the information, and shall not be liable for any direct or indirect damages related to the information it provides. The underlying impact data used in this ranking is provided with permission from The Upright Project and is primarily based on version 1.3.1520 of its model. The ranking is comprised exclusively of companies that are eligible regarding the scope described in this document. A mention in the ranking is a positive recognition based on the applied assessment framework at the time. The ranking is the result of an elaborate process which, due to the interval of data-collection and analysis, is a reflection of the available data at that time. Furthermore, events preceding or following 04/09/2026 and/or pertaining to individual persons affiliated/associated to the companies were not included in the analysis. As such, the results of this ranking should not be used as the sole source of information for future deliberations. The information provided in this ranking should be considered in conjunction with other available information about companies. The quality of companies that are not included in the rankings is not disputed.