Key Findings:

• 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.