Blackwall becomes Estonia's newest unicorn on an implied valuation

Blackwall, an Estonian cybersecurity company, has been valued at 1.03 billion euros in the 2026 TopTech ranking, up from about 221 million euros a year earlier, a rise of 368 per cent that makes it the country's newest unicorn and the fifth most valuable technology company on the list. Wise, which is listed, tops the table at 10.98 billion euros, Bolt follows at 7.09 billion and Veriff at 1.8 billion.

Read the word valued carefully. No new round priced Blackwall at a billion euros. The ranking, compiled by the advisory firm Prudentia Tallinn and the Siena Secondary Fund, applies an implied valuation, and its co-author says exactly that on the record.

That is how most unicorn lists work and an unusually honest way to publish one. The compilers say they expect the billion-euro figure to be confirmed by an independent party through Blackwall's next funding round. Until then it is an estimate built from revenue and a multiple, and the multiple is doing as much work as the revenue.

What Blackwall sells

Blackwall's GateKeeper filters malicious traffic before it reaches a customer's applications. That places it in front of the product rather than inside it, which is an easier sale to a company that does not want to change its code. The valuation rests on revenue growth in that niche plus the multiples the public market currently pays for security companies, which are high. The ranking gave Blackwall its special award for the year's biggest riser.

Two companies explain the headline decline

The combined value of the 30 companies in the table fell to 26.4 billion euros from 27.7 billion a year earlier, which sounds like a bad year for Estonian technology. It is mostly two companies. Wise and Bolt account for 68.3 per cent of the total, and the top five for 84.6 per cent. Rannus estimates that the pair lost around 15 per cent of their combined value, which on its own outweighs the growth everywhere else in the list.

An index with that concentration is closer to a tracker of two companies than to a measure of an ecosystem, and it should be read that way. The interesting information is in the next 25 rows, where the revaluations are not large enough to move a headline and therefore rarely get reported.

Defence is now the largest sector by company count

Seven of the 30 companies are in defence technology, with a combined value of 1.07 billion euros. That makes the sector the largest in the table by number of companies. Frankenburg rose 89 per cent to 283 million euros, Threod 45 per cent to 245 million and Milrem 27 per cent to 177 million. DefSecIntel fell 47 per cent to about 101 million. Hevi Optronics, KrattWorks and Ark Robotics are new to the list.

KrattWorks is the one worth understanding, because its product is specific and its customers are named. The company makes the DART target drone, and its co-founder explains both the engineering and the sales position.

Voitka also cites a seven-year contract with the Estonian Defence Forces worth 15 million euros. The company makes its own cameras, radios, autopilot and ground control software, which means it can change a frequency band or an encryption standard for a customer instead of waiting on a supplier or an export licence, and more than half its team are reservists with military experience. It is not in the top five, and the ranking does not publish its valuation.

Smaller teams, younger founders, less capital

• The four companies classified as B2B software fell 32.4 per cent in value, with Pipedrive the largest single effect and Toggl down 37 per cent. Scoro rose 5 per cent.
• Fintech was mixed at the top and strong lower down: Wallester rose 46 per cent to 139 million euros, while the software developers Nortal and Helmes grew 7.4 per cent and 1.4 per cent.
• Creem, which raised 5 million euros in September, went from one person to fifteen and to millions of euros of recurring revenue in two years, and Zobi has entered the ranking.

Rannus argues that founders now in their twenties have never built without artificial intelligence, so they ask how few people they need rather than how many, and hire only when the software cannot keep up. He cites companies reaching in a year, with five to fifteen staff and a couple of million euros, what used to take fifty people and tens of millions. The claim is his, and the examples are early, but the direction matches the revenue multiples in the table.

He also makes the case for secondaries, on the grounds that much of the value in the ranking sits on paper while early employees and angels wait a decade for an exit. In a country where the previous generation of founders is now writing the next generation's first cheques, money that moves tends to come back into the ecosystem. Veriff is in our directory; Blackwall and KrattWorks are not, so nothing here rests on a directory profile.

What to watch

• Whether Blackwall's next round confirms the billion-euro mark. A priced round at or above it converts an estimate into a fact, and one below it would say something about revenue multiples in security.
• Whether the compilers publish Blackwall's revenue. The valuation is a multiple of a number the public cannot see, which is the weakest link in an otherwise careful methodology.
• Whether defence keeps adding companies. Seven of 30 is a large share for a sector that barely existed in the ranking a few years ago, and the next test is whether those companies grow into their valuations or consolidate.
• Whether the concentration falls. Wise and Bolt will dominate the total for as long as they are worth more than the other 28 companies combined, and a genuine second tier would show up as a falling share.
• Whether any of the small AI-native teams reaches a valuation the index can measure. Their revenue is real; the question is whether it compounds without the hiring that used to accompany it.

A ranking is a snapshot of other people's numbers, and this one is careful to say which kind of numbers they are. The claim worth taking seriously is not that Estonia has another unicorn. It is that the next ones are being built in defence and security, by fewer people, on revenue rather than on capital, and that a table built on multiples will only see them once they are large enough to matter. The authors think that is already happening. The next year of priced rounds will decide whether they are right.