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With almost a dozen unicorns produced, Estonia is nowhere near stopping its mighty startup factory — and the annual Startup Awards proves it like nothing else. On January 22, 2026, over 400 founders gathered at Nobel hall in Noblessner for the 7th Estonian Startup Awards. The results paint a clear picture of where Estonia’s tech scene is heading.
The undisputed champions
Veriff and Kaarel Kotkas dominated the night with a clean sweep: Founder of the Year, Revenue Hack of the Year, and wins in both FinTech and SaaS categories. The identity verification company doubled revenue past $100M, reached profitability, and tripled service volumes year-over-year. After spending a decade verifying 400 million people, they’re now on track to process another 400 million in just five months.
Hot on their heels: KrattWorks and Tõnis Voitka took home DefenceTech of the Year and secured second place in both Founder of the Year and Revenue Hack categories. The drone manufacturer grew revenue 26x to €19.7M while scaling from 22 to 68 people and ramping production from 100 drones per year to 120 per month.
Category champions
- Newcomer: Gridraven (sensorless Dynamic Line Rating for power grids)
- HealthTech: Muun Health (wearable hormone monitoring biosensor)
- SaaS: Pactum (autonomous AI negotiation agents, raised Estonia’s largest round at $54M)
- DeepTech: Skeleton (opened €220M SuperFactory in Germany for AI data center infrastructure)
- FinTech: Veriff
- DefenceTech: KrattWorks
- Impact: ALPA Kids (native language e-learning games, 2.5M+ downloads)
- Giving Back: DefenceTech Meetup (drawing 300-500 participants bimonthly)
- Investor: Sten Tamkivi, Plural (who is in talks to raise a staggering €1B fund)
What it all means
The awards revealed five major trends shaping Estonia’s startup ecosystem, as highlighted in an official blog post:
- AI is the comeback engine – It’s no longer a feature but a fundamental transformation tool, as proven by Veriff’s resurgence.
- Newcomers at unprecedented scale – The pipeline is wider and more active than ever.
- DefenceTech has become a European gravity point – Estonia now hosts the continent’s largest DefenceTech meetup culture.
- DeepTech is finally delivering – After years of patient development, science-heavy startups are showing visible results.
- SaaS is back, leaner and profitable – After brutal market conditions, Estonian SaaS companies returned, focused on sustainability over growth-at-all-costs.
With 506 nominations (a record), 107 shortlisted candidates across 11 categories, and voting by 240 fellow founders, the 2025 awards showcased that the ecosystem is thriving even after a few years of relatively modest funding spends from VCs. The future unicorns to watch? The organizers are betting on Skeleton, Pactum, Starship, Modash, Katana, Blackwall, Veriff, and KrattWorks.
Read the whole list of nominees here.
