FCF Fox Corporate Finance GmbH is pleased to publish the “Advanced Manufacturing Venture Capital Report – 2024”. The report is part of the “FCF DeepTech Series”, which is a quarterly series of reports tracking European venture capital funding trends within four main DeepTech verticals.
The Advanced Manufacturing Venture Capital Report highlights venture capital investment activity in startups in the advanced manufacturing sector, with subsectors including additive manufacturing, robotic automation, sensors and IoT platforms, and industrial process software.
Key findings are:
- Continuous decline in the number of VC investments in the Advanced
Manufacturing sector: The number of closed transactions has decreased continuously within the last 5 years from 276 in 2019 to 192 in 2023. Moreover, Q1 in 2024 clearly marks the weakest first quarter over the five-year observation period with only 34 closed deals, compared to the previous Q1’s (79, 71, 67, 84, and 74 closed deals in Q1’19 to Q1’23, respectively). This development reflects the current overall difficult development in the VC environment. - Germany leads the ranking by deal volume: With a funding volume of €752m (2019 to Q1 2024), Germany is ahead of the UK (€651m) and France (€610m). Due to low transparency (only 57% of German deals publish financing volume vs. 82% in the UK), the actual volume (and leadership position) might be even stronger.
- The maturity of the sector and its companies continues to increase: The proportion of later stage-deals has risen from 30% in 2019 to almost 50% in 2023, indicating a greater maturity of the Advanced Manufacturing sector. This is further evidenced by increasing average deal sizes, i.e., average deal size has almost doubled in Q1 2024 to €6.4m compared to €3.5m in 2023. However, the IPO market remains quiet, with only 1 IPO completed in the past 5 years.
- M&A activity is on the rise: In Q1 2024, 6 M&A deals were completed already. Compared to the previous three years with a total of 12 closed deals each, this indicates a potential significant increase of M&A activities in this sector in 2024. Further, this development could be a sign of an upcoming consolidation phase within the Advanced Manufacturing sector
To access the full report, please click here.
Von Florian Theyermann und Daniel Klier.