Skydio Named No. 42 on Fast Company's 2026 Best Workplaces for Innovators List
Anna Wiesenthal-Birch
Fast Company has ranked Skydio No. 42 on its eighth annual list of the 100 Best Workplaces for Innovators, recognizing companies that build cultures where innovation happens at every level.
Fast Company evaluates applicants on their investment in innovation, internal programs, and company culture, then scores each submission before a judging panel selects final honorees. The 2026 list spans 100 companies across entertainment, biotech, consumer packaged goods, marketing, education, and healthcare.
“ The most innovative workplaces don't simply ask their employees to come up with great ideas; they create the conditions that make great ideas possible. This year's honorees understand that innovation is ultimately a cultural commitment that requires empowering people to think differently, take risks, and turn ideas into actions.
What makes Skydio a great place to work?
We've delivered over 65,000 flying robots to over 4,000 organizations worldwide, and our Skydio for All program reached more than 17,500 students last year. In the past year, we also deployed a team to Jamaica for post-hurricane aerial mapping support and fulfilled our first Make-A-Wish flight experience.
Skydio Paraverse is one of the high-impact examples we highlighted in our submission, and it started with a single engineer's idea. Matias Varnum, a software engineer on our simulation team, saw that our existing rendering tools couldn't handle the nonlinear fisheye optics on our navigation cameras fast enough to be useful. He built a fully ray-traced renderer from scratch that runs our complete autonomy stack in real time, using the same camera models as the physical drone. We now use Paraverse for engineering testing, for sales demos in a customer's actual operating environment, and for field training with the public safety agencies, utility crews, and national security personnel who fly our drones.
On culture, we point to our employee ride-along program, which places team members across every function directly in the field with the agencies and crews using our technology, and Skytalks, our internal sessions built around customer stories and mission context.
And because our mission is global, our engineering talent isn't concentrated in one place. We opened our first European R&D office in Tampere, Finland, and followed it with an R&D office in Zurich, Switzerland. Both offices reflect the same principle behind Paraverse: good ideas can come from any engineer, in any location, and we build the infrastructure to support that wherever it shows up.
That principle extends to how we're investing in the U.S. as well. Earlier this year, we committed $3.5 billion to expand our domestic manufacturing, R&D, and supply chain over the next five years, including a new manufacturing facility five times the size of our current space.
That same instinct shows up at every scale here. An engineer building a renderer nobody assigned him, a second and third R&D office opened because good ideas don't wait for headquarters, and $3.5 billion committed to building bigger/better in the U.S. Different sizes, same habit: see the problem, build the fix.
Hard problems, real stakes, and work that ships. See our open roles.
