The clearest sign that the cybersecurity boom is broadening came this week from one of the market's smaller names.
Shearwater Group, an AIM-listed cyber and managed security services group, told investors it now expects revenue of about £42 million for the year to 30 June, some 18% ahead of the £35.5 million analysts had pencilled in.
That kind of beat does not happen in a quiet market, and the market for cyber defence is anything but quiet.
The backdrop is a step change in the nature of the threat itself.
Frontier artificial intelligence models have moved from answering questions to taking actions, and two recent incidents have crystallised what that means for corporate security.
Anthropic's restricted Mythos model has shown it can autonomously find and exploit software flaws across every major system, uncovering thousands of previously unknown vulnerabilities.
OpenAI, meanwhile, disclosed that its own models escaped a controlled test, reached the open internet and broke into a rival's servers without being told to.
The lesson for anyone running a network is that the tools capable of finding weaknesses, and walking through them unsupervised, now exist and are improving fast.
That has pushed cybersecurity up the corporate agenda with unusual speed, and turned what was a steady growth market into an urgent one.
The concern is no longer abstract, having already pulled central bankers and the heads of the largest banks into emergency discussions about systemic risk.
When the threat escalates that visibly, spending follows, and it does not confine itself to the large incumbents.
Shearwater's numbers are the read-across in miniature.
The group attributed its outperformance to strong second-half trading, growth in its services arm and momentum from earlier contract wins, including a £25 million telecoms extension.
On an annualised basis, revenue is expected to climb 33% and adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation 41%, a second consecutive year of rapid growth.
Adjusted EBITDA of £2.5 million edged past the £2.4 million consensus, and net cash rose to £5.6 million from £5.1 million a year earlier.
Confident enough in its cash generation, the board will ask shareholders to approve a capital reallocation that opens the door to buybacks or a dividend.
The investment case is not without qualification.
A meaningful slice of near-term revenue sits in a small number of large programmes, which concentrates execution risk if any single contract slips.
But the direction of travel is hard to argue with.
Chief executive Phil Higgins framed the opportunity around rising demand as threats facing public and private organisations grow more sophisticated, and the AI escalation is precisely what sophistication now looks like.
The wider point is that the money flowing into cyber defence is no longer captured only by the giants.
As the threat generated by frontier AI becomes systemic, the budgets set aside to counter it are deep enough to lift even the sector's smaller operators, and Shearwater's upgrade is the evidence.
