Robotics & AI: 2025 Valuation Multiples

The words Robotics and Artificial Intelligence were relegated to the sci-fi world until just a few years ago. They are now part of our everyday life, with AI powering some of the most widespread technology that populates our digital world. With the growing demand for the technology, Robotics & AI companies have become more and more valuable over the past few years.

Like many other cutting-edge technology sectors, AI investment boomed in 2021, with start-up funding more than doubling from $33.7bn in 2020 to $74.6bn, according to CB Insights research. On top of that, unlike many other verticals, AI was able to weather the funding drought of the past two years, maintaining healthy amounts of cash invested: $47.3bn in 2022 and $42.5bn in 2023.

Most of the money invested, notes CB Insights, went to generative AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which dominated the sector (and media attention) with their Large Language Models.

Generative AI is the branch of artificial intelligence which focuses on the production of original content based on a machine learning model. Such content can include text, images, sound and potentially many other types of data. With the release of ChatGPT in the fall of 2022, generative AI nearly monopolised global tech and business media.

In June 2023, McKinsey estimated that generative AI could add between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion to the global economy, by allowing unprecedented improvements in productivity across a number of use cases that has been growing steadily since the sector’s inception.

However, this innovation has not come without its drawbacks. Artificial Intelligence, and generative AI in particular, have come under fire for lacking a reliable control system for data security, transparency, and overall ethical implications, which greatly hinder its adoption over large scale—especially for business purposes.

AI company’s governance, ethical practices and business model have come under fire time and time again. Household names in the AI space like Stability AI (of Stable Diffusion fame), and Inflection (the team behind the “first emotionally intelligent AI”) have gone through layoffs and resignations.

Even OpenAI has seen some high-profile resignations, especially in the aftermath of CEO Sam Altman being fired, then quickly reinstated by the board. Both OpenAI and Nvidia shook in their shoes in January this year, when the launch of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s open-source AI model challenged everything we thought we knew about the economics of LLMs.

While software companies tend to use the term AI more loosely, Robotics—and industrial applications of robotics in particular—have more precise measures to compare the efficiency of artificially intelligent robots versus humans.

According to Tianhao Zhang, co-Founder of Covariant—an AI Robotics start-up that raised a $75m Series C extension in 2023, on top of $80m already secured in 2021—“the real-world efficacy of the software “brain” powering the robot can vary, and assessing this new technology is complex,” but a good analysis should be based on the robot’s autonomy, its adaptability to changing conditions and its learning speed.

Thanks to proven efficiency results and the necessity created by staff shortages and supply chain disruptions, adoption rates of robotic solutions for industrial purposes is skyrocketing, and so is the company value of their manufacturers.

The Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence ETF (BOTZ), managed by Mirae Asset Financial Group, “seeks to invest in companies that potentially stand to benefit from increased adoption and utilization of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), including those involved with industrial robotics and automation, non-industrial robots, and autonomous vehicles.”

The 36 companies in the fund are all listed on public stock exchanges, and so their financial metrics may differ from younger start-ups introducing innovative technologies, typically considered a high-risk-high-reward investment.

For example, Dealroom.co estimates Covariant’s valuation at $400m per their latest funding round on an estimated annual revenue of about $30m. This would imply a Revenue multiple between 13x and 14x, which would place it in the top 10% of the cohort analysed in this report.

Similar to Covariant, other private start-ups in the field of AI and Robotics will be priced according to their potential, rather than their latest financial data. However, analysing the revenue and EBITDA multiples of their public counterparts allows us to establish a benchmark that can be useful to infer the valuation of a private company.

Robotics & AI Valuation Multiples

Revenue multiples for Robotics & AI companies grew throughout all of 2020 and peaked halfway through 2021, tripling from 2.2x in Q1 2022 to nearly 6x in Q3 2021. Multiples then hovered around the 5x mark until mid-2022, when they saw a steep decline likely due to the adverse macro environment.

After peaking again at 4.1x in Q1 2024, revenue multiples in the sector saw yet another drop for 5 consecutive quarters. In Q1 2025 the median revenue multiple for Robotics & AI companies was 2.5x.

Source: YCharts

The multiples are very unevenly distributed throughout the sample of 36 companies, with the vast majority of the faring below the 8x mark by the end of last year, but several high-performers like NVIDIA—who designs chips used to manage the nearly infinite amount of processing that AI requires, as well as investing hundreds of millions into AI companies—recording a 20x revenue multiple in the first quarter of this year.

Source: YCharts In the chart above, the lines indicate the range of EV/Revenue multiples in our cohorts, while the boxes highlight the Interquartile Range (IQR), which is where the median 50% of the cohort ranks based on their valuation multiple.

EV/EBITDA multiples saw a less extreme, but steadier trends than EV/Revenue multiples. Robotics & AI Companies had a median EV/Revenue multiple of 15.8x in Q1 2025. On par with pre-pandemic levels.

Source: YCharts

EV/EBITDA revenue multiples were also more evenly distributed than their Revenue counterparts, although with a wider range. In our sample, EBITDA multiples ranged from 2x to over 66x in Q4 2023.

Source: YCharts In the chart above, the lines indicate the range of EV/EBITDA multiples in our cohorts, while the boxes highlight the Interquartile Range (IQR), which is where the median 50% of the cohort ranks based on their valuation multiple.