Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2026 shortlists drone radars and space cameras

Estonian counter-drone company Marduk, space-camera developer CrystalSpace and renewable-energy software maker Soldera are the three finalists for this year’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. The winner will be announced on 14 November at the Best Estonian Companies gala.

The Young Entrepreneur Award is run by the Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and LHV, with the support of the Estonian president, and comes with a €5,000 prize from the bank. It is judged on growth built on innovative products and on exports already won or in reach.

Optical radar in the air, imaging in orbit

Marduk builds camera systems that spot objects in the air and classify them as drones, birds, aircraft, or helicopters. Leet Rauno Lember, its managing director and a shareholder, calls the result an optical radar: it works on its own and, unlike radar, needs no frequency licence.

The technology was the easier half. Buyers had to be convinced that drones belonged on a threat list at all, and for years they were not. “We were often pushed back, told it was a ‘pointless thing’,” Lember says. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine ended that argument and brought the earlier sceptics back.

The decision that shaped the company was a retreat. Marduk first aimed at a complete chain, from detection through countermeasures to missiles, a programme too expensive and too slow for a small team to carry. “Then we had to take a hard decision: narrow the focus,” Lember says. What survived was detection and targeting, sold to countries but mainly through manufacturers that would rather integrate a partner’s sensor than build their own, Sweden’s Saab above all. “We can’t outrun the giants.” The systems have reached Ukraine through those partners, and Marduk is among the Estonian firms in Dronetex, the European counter-drone coalition founded by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

The order book is the next test. Pre-sales for next year point to more than €10 M in revenue, up from €1.21M in 2025, with forecasts of €20M or more if production keeps pace. Lember wants a 50 to 100-person “boutique” rather than a thousand-person plant, which means developing future sensors and shipping systems already sold at the same time. “Setting up full production, series production, is going to be painful,” he says. Certification and a stable production team are the work ahead.

CrystalSpace makes cameras for satellites, landers and rovers. That business still accounts for about 90% of its activity, and chief executive Pätris Halapuu, a co-founder, is on the shortlist for a second year running. The reason is the turn he is managing now: since around 2021, image processing and AI algorithms run inside the camera itself, so footage no longer has to be sent to a central computer. Only the useful information leaves the device.

Defence drones turned out to need exactly that. “For autonomous systems that have to react fast, every millisecond matters,” Halapuu says. Sales, though, move at the customer’s pace: a space deal usually takes one to two years, and CrystalSpace has spent four years in talks before closing one. “Coming from another field, it startles you that things move so slowly, but we are used to even slower.”

The plan keeps both markets. Space work continues to grow, while over the next three to four years the balance should tip towards defence.

Agents instead of headcount

Soldera automates renewable-energy compliance: a group operating across borders has to prove, market by market, that its electricity meets local rules. “Behind it is brutal bureaucracy, and we automate all of it,” says chief executive Stenver Jerkku. Customers include Mars, the confectionery group behind M&M’s and Snickers, and the platform carries close to a thousand customers and 6,000 power plants in 30 countries.

Revenue was €1M in 2025 and has since surpassed €4M. It is funded by a €2.5M venture cheque and a €1.6M applied-research grant from Enterprise Estonia, secured nine months after the round. Jerkku’s plan is to keep the growth and not the payroll: agents take on tasks in parallel, coordination between teams falls away, and some middle-management work can be automated. “The goal is to build a billion-euro company with fewer than 30 employees. With agents.”

He is as direct about the company that failed on the way there. After leaving eAgronom, which he co-founded, he bought out a carbon-credit trading platform as part of his exit agreement; it was, in his view, ahead of its market. The team fell from 15 people to two before Soldera began. “If an entrepreneur says everything went right and we made no mistakes, there are two options: either he’s lying, or he didn’t actually do anything.”

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