According to SBA estimates there are more than 627,000 new businesses that open every year, but there are some especially exciting new tech startups right in the Steel City. Many have opened up with the help of a good workplace compensation lawyer and business attorney and other trusted professionals, but some are seriously blazing trails, creating potentially life-changing breakthroughs.

412 Food Rescue

This company works with over 600 charity groups across seven counties in the Pittsburgh region, and only launched in 2015. Since that time, it’s managed to save some three million pounds of excess food, distributing to partner organizations to help those in need. How? It developed an Uber-like app to link businesses and charities with leftover food to volunteers that are willing to make the deliveries. The nonprofit organization is expanding to other areas too, including San Francisco, Cleveland and Philadelphia.

Duolingo

Duolingo is helping people around the world learn new languages without having to pay a dime. It was founded in 2011 and has become the most downloaded education app on Android and iOS, with more than 200 million users. It was awarded Best of the Best by Android and named the iPhone’s App of the Year. The company says that its approach is that learning should be personalized, based on science and fun. It has a mission to bring “free language education” to all.

Pineapple Payments

Founded in 2016, Pineapple Payments was named one of the best new startups in Pittsburgh and throughout Pennsylvania for 2018. It offers processing technology to online businesses as well as brick-and-mortar organizations with a focus on SaaS, mid-market E-Commerce and Enterprise technology integration. It bundles innovative serves and products, bringing a more user-friendly credit card processing experience to merchants. The company serves over 15,000 merchants and processes $3 billion in payments volume annually. Recently it acquired Pittsburgh-based AthleteTrax and a growing distribution network with plans to further develop and drive new sales to the AthleteTrax platform.

Argo AI

This artificial intelligence startup in Pittsburgh brought competition to Uber when entering the race to develop autonomous vehicle technology. In 2017, Ford pledged to invest a billion dollars to the company over five years in exchange for it creating a virtual driver system for the auto manufacturer’s self-driving car, scheduled to be released in 2021. With this, Argo AI has continued to grow its workforce and also acquired Princeton Lightwave to get access to intelligence behind a sensor that’s believed to allow driverless cars to handle the challenge of weather conditions, high speed and navigating an urban environment better.

FOREVER

Forever provides a total memory-keeping solution so that all your memories are digitized, secured and available for many generations to come. Its aim is to literally allow your memories to last FOREVER, and it has a solid structure on how to accomplish what seems implausible. To use it you send physical memories in its conversion box and then they’re all digitized before being returned to you. You own the storage space with the money paid to preserve your memories forever.