PayPal co-founder Max Levchin faced some flak recently when he announced he was starting a new company in the already crowded field of digital payments. Levchin is one of several Silicon Valley luminaries who have talked big about the tech industry's timidity. So starting yet another payments company seemed decidedly unambitious.
Yet plenty of companies out there are still taking a run at the next moonshot. Their technologies don't let you share photos or offer you a deal on your next manicure. Instead, these companies could change the world in deep ways by solving tough problems, rather than the kind of "problems" too many startups make up as justifcations for the "solutions" they're trying to sell. Not that photo-sharing isn't great (Levchin did that, too). Unlike what the companies that follow are trying to do, however, it's not exactly shooting for the moon.
Above: Emotiv Lifescience
You don't get much closer to a moonshot than "let's build a machine that reads people's minds." Even if Emotiv Lifescience's brainwave scanner was just for use as a videogame controller, the company's aspirations would still be ambitious. But when you start talking about a brain-controlled wheelchair, you're entering the territory of technology that matters.
Photo: Emotiv
Immumetrix
While still a grad student, Immumetrix scientist Christina Fan developed a way to diagnose Down syndrome in a fetus through a simple test of the mother's blood, rather than the far riskier, unpleasant use of amniocentesis. She and her colleagues are working to perfect the technique, as well as developing ways to use high-speed DNA sequencing to analyze individuals' immune systems for the eventual development of custom treatments.
Fan says: "In the far future, knowledge about the immune repertoire could even inform genetic engineering to give a person super-immunity or to reverse immune disorders."
Photo: joselugo/Flickr
LightSail Energy
Wind and solar power are great, except when it's not sunny or windy. But wunderkind Danielle Fong, who graduated from college at 17, has developed a new way to store green energy that claims new benchmarks for efficiency. Her system uses compressed air and a fine mist of water to pump electricity back into the grid during times of peak demand. LightSail backers Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla and Bill Gates have poured more than $37 million so far into the Berkeley-based company.
Photo: Sam Howzit/Flickr
Huawei
Unlike most companies on this list, Huawei is anything but a scrappy startup. The one-time importer of Hong Kong telephone equipment has grown into a telecom giant and one of the world's leading smartphone makers. Though not widely known in the U.S. (yet), Huawei has succeeded not because of its phones' features but the lack of them.
Huawei's low-priced Android handsets are a key reason smartphones have become less of a luxury and more of a commodity in China and other parts of the world. According to one recent estimate, about one-seventh of the world's population uses smartphones. Imagine what happens when the other six billion do.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired 
M-PESA/Safaricom
In much of the developing world, credit and debit cards have never caught on, since the telecom networks needed to support their use doesn't exist. In those same places, however, mobile phone use has exploded. In a phenomenon known as "leapfrogging," the wires needed to power traditional card-based transactions might never get installed, since everyone will just use their phones instead.
In Kenya, mobile operator Safaricom has developed M-PESA, a way to transfer money and make microloans using text messages — no bank account required. Unlike in, say, the U.S., mobile payments have taken off in Kenya thanks to M-PESA, with millions of users. The company is working on rolling out the service to other countries where a lack of financial and technological infrastructure could cease to be a barrier to joining the 21st-century economy.
Photo: Sipa via AP Images
Nest
Saving energy is good. Saving energy without having to think about it is better. The buildings we inhabit are among the greatest sources of greenhouse gases. Nest's smart thermostats seek to shrink this carbon footprint by learning our habits to automate indoor climate control.
Photo: Nest
Organovo
The design software juggernaut Autodesk recently partnered with Organovo to make human organs designed by computer and printed by machines a future reality. Already, Organovo's 3-D bioprinters are being used by medical researchers to print tissues for experimentation. Organovo co-founder Andras Forgacs went on to start Modern Meadow, a company developing printable meat and leather.
Photo: Dave Bullock / Wired
Plexxikon
Few startups have had as much success in the war on cancer as Plexxikon. The company has shown dramatic results with a compound that targets a mutation found in many advanced-stage melanoma tumors (above, seen under a microscope). The next time you try to talk yourself down from work stress by saying "It's not like we're curing cancer," remember: These guys actually are.
Photo: Pulmonary Pathology/Flickr
Oxitec
In much of the world, mosquitoes remain one of the most virulent vectors for infectious diseases. Oxitec's genetically altered bugs fight Dengue fever by passing down a lethal gene to their offspring that kills them before they can reach adulthood. Curbing an entire species has raised concerns about unintended ecological consequences. But the use of genetic engineering as a public health tool is only likely to grow if Oxitec's modified mosquitoes help eradicate this deadly disease.
Photo: Oxitec
SpaceX
Forget about the moonshot. How about a Mars shot? Of all the members of the PayPal mafia, which includes Levchin and Thiel, Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has done the most to chase innovation on a truly grand scale. Musk not only wants to put humans on Mars; he wants 80,000 of us to live in a Martian colony. And SpaceX is his launching pad.
In the meantime, the company is busy making privatized space travel a reality. Most recently, SpaceX showcased a rocket that takes off and lands vertically—just like the ships in every sci-fi movie ever. Another SpaceX craft just docked with the International Space Station.
Photo: Space X