Twelve robotics companies in financial trouble: what do the notices say?

The twelve did not reach the same place. By the latest notices we collected, as we read the notices, two had a liquidation closed, six a liquidation opened and not yet closed, three a court-approved repayment plan, and one were in proceedings with neither outcome recorded. A court date alone does not tell us how a company’s story ends; a plan is not a failure, and an opened liquidation is not yet a closed one. How they were chosen: we searched BODACC for the 89 companies on our list; 70 had at least one notice of any kind, and 12 a collective procedure opened in 2022 or later. Do not read twelve of 89 as a failure rate.

Before the proceedings, ten of the twelve had a public grant or a funded project on record, and for nine the last recorded change in share capital was an increase. They do not say how much cash the company had when trouble arrived, and a grant recorded years earlier is not evidence that money was still arriving. An increase in share capital can be fresh money, a debt converted, or a reorganisation; the notice records the change, not its nature. And the twelve are observed until their court dates while the other companies are observed until our extraction, so the comparison the earlier draft made — the failed had more public money — is not one these records can carry.

These records document financial difficulty in twelve companies, including companies that had taken part in publicly supported research. They do not explain why the difficulties arose. To investigate that, we would need evidence about sales, costs, cash and the terms of financing, beside the public notices. The twelve company records are in the directory, each with its notices; the sources and the method are on the data page. That is where this note ends, and it does not promise a larger explanation.