Going The Distance

Discover the secrets of America’s most innovative public companies—from the entrepreneurs who have guided them through IPOs and onto our list.

- Victoria Finkle, Helaine Olen, and Kate Rockwood

IMPINJ JUST MIGHT BE the most ubiquitous tech company you’ve never heard of.

Last year the Seattle company, which makes radio-tracking tags, connected some six billion items around the world. Airbus Helicopters uses Impinj tags on its aircraft assembly lines; Macy’s uses them to keep tabs on merchandise. Hospitals around the country rely on Impinj devices to track equipment and even patients. And every November, the organizers of the New York City Marathon stick Impinj chips on bibs to track the times and progress of some 50,000 runners.

It’s a sweet, if mostly silent, world domination for CEO Chris Diorio, who co-founded Impinj with Caltech physicist Carver Mead in 2000 and took it public last year. “I look as far ahead as I can to what’s possible and then try to figure out what it takes to get there,” Diorio says. “And not just what’s possible—but what’s exciting, what’s transformative.”

That sort of long-distance planning and focus on innovation is common to all the founders whose companies made this year’s Founders 10 list. Every one of them had an outstanding “score” of patents applied for and granted in 2016, according to IFI Claims Patent Services, which helped Inc. identify the entrepreneurs who now run America’s most innovative public companies.