FCF Fox Corporate Finance GmbH is pleased to publish the “Robotics Venture Capital Report – 2022”.
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:- Funding volumes continue to rise: While the number of annual VC deals has stagnated at around 300 since 2018, the total volume continues to rise, reaching a record €2.9bn in 2021. This is due to mega deals (CRM Surgical with €497m & €239m and Exotec with €295m) on the one hand and generally higher average and median deal values on the other hand
- The maturity of the Robotics sector is increasing: in addition, deal types and investors are changing: While in 2017 66% of deals were early-stage deals (accelerator and seed capital) from respective investors, this share drops to 33% in H1/2022
- The UK is the leading country for robotics investments: With a financing volume of €1.5bn in 2017 – H1/2022, UK is ahead of France with €1.0bn and Germany with €777 million.
- The relevant sub-sectors “Medical Robots” and “Industrial Robots” attract the most capital: “Medical Robots” seem to dominate with 31% of the €4.4bn total volume of relevant VC investments from 2017 – H1 2022. However, this is due to the very high investment volumes of CMR Surgical (€859m since 2017). Adjusting for this outlier, Medical Robotics represents only c. 14% of the volume (€291m) and is overtaken by the classic segments “Industrial Robots” (€1.3bn) with the €295m mega deal from Exotec and “Robotic Enablers” (€1.0bn).
- Besides the various EU vehicles, bpifrance and Plug-and-Play were the most active investors with 20 deals each, followed by SOSV (16 deals).
- The largest M&A exit was made by arculus: The German company in the field of autonomous mobile robots was acquired by Jungheinrich for €102m
To access the full report, please click here.
By Florian Theyermann and Mathias Übler