Ask HN: What companies attack an NP-Hard problem as part of their core business?

Another way to phrase this is, what is the intersection of the NP-hard problem space and the current business landscape?<p>A related question: how effective would one be to search for start-up ideas by looking for where NP-Hardness crops up in the real world?<p>Also, more pedagogically, maybe these answers may provide examples for explaining what NP-Hardness is to myself and others.<p>As for an example of a company whose core business is basically solving (or approximating solutions to) an NP-hard problem, how about Fedex? I've heard it's more appropriate to think of Fedex as an algorithms company that happens to do shipping rather than a shipping company. So is it fair to say their core business is solving, or finding approximate solutions to, instances of the "traveling businessman" problem?<p>Not sure if this question is well-posed exactly, so please help if my terminology or conceptual understanding is off.