FCF Fox Corporate Finance GmbH is pleased to publish the “Robotics Venture Capital Report – 2021”.
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.
Main findings are:- The robotic sector matures: After several year of growth – volume and number of deals – the robotic sectors shows signs of maturing. A stagnating number of deals (on a high level of 100 deal p.a. since 2018) sees a rising volume of investments – €1.1bn in the first 9 month of 2021 compared to €106m in 2017. This is in part driven by mega deals – CRM Surgical with €497m and Agile Robots with €184m – but the average and median deal-size is increasing. But in particular the type of deal and investor class is changing: In 2017 66% of all deals were very early stage deals (accelerator and seed deals), in 2021 this type of deals I only 26%. The overwhelming part of deals are now classical venture rounds, up from 26% in 2017 to 67% in 2021. This underlines the trend of robotic companies leaving the „garage phase“ behind and entering commercialisation
- Medical robotics receives the highest investment volumes – but only seemingly due to one mega deal: With 40% of total VC-investment volume of €3bn for the period of 2017-Q3 2021 medical robotics seems to dominate the robotics sector. But this is only due to the investments in one specific company – CMR surgical, a provider of surgery robots – receiving a total of €860m in 4 rounds. Adjusting for that outlier, medical robotics represents only 14% (€291m) of the total volume, being overtaken by more classical robotic segments such as industrials robotics (€791m) or robotic enablers (component and software provider – €546m) and is more in the league of drones (€237m)
- UK start-ups receive the highest investment volumes – but only seemingly due to one outlier: With VC investments of €1.3bn for the period of 2017-Q3 2021 the UK leads the country ranking. However, CMR Surgical alone accounts for €860m and outlier Spywai for another €76m. Adjusted for those outliers, UK (€365m) is in line with France (€538m, adjusted for outliers €407m) and Germany (€508m, adjusted for outliers €324). Taking into account that 61% of deals in UK publish the deal volume (France 52%) whereas in Germany only 34% do so, results into a substantially higher undisclosed volume for Germany and therefore an therefore an understated volume compared to the actual investment volume in Germany.
To access the full report, please click here.
By Florian Theyermann and Mathias Übler