Circus SE’s Robot-Backed Bonds and Lease Strategy Aim to Turn Pilots into Revenue

Circus SE raises €1.7M asset-backed bond via FINEXITY, plus €50M facility, to fund autonomous cooking robot rollout for military and civilian clients amid deep revenue gap.

Circus SE has pulled off an unusual financing hat trick: a fully placed asset-based bond backed by its own autonomous cooking robots, coupled with a €50 million capital-markets facility. The 1.7 million-euro bond, structured via a special-purpose vehicle on FINEXITY’s platform, pays 6 percent annual interest and runs until April 2031. The bigger picture is a strategic agreement with FINEXITY that paves the way for multiple tranches of hybrid debt, combining traditional and tokenized instruments, to fund a global rollout of robotic infrastructure for both military and civilian customers.

The move comes as the company tries to close a yawning gap between ambition and revenue. Circust last reported just 250,000 euros in sales against an operating loss of nearly 15 million euros. Its shares closed Friday at 7.99 euros, down 1.11 percent on the day and 33.69 percent year to date, trading roughly 65 percent below a 52-week high of 22.80 euros. A relative-strength index of 24.1 points to deeply oversold territory.

To ease the financial hurdle for customers, Circus has paired its financing push with a leasing model starting at 4,000 euros per month, offered through Landesbank Württemberg and Siemens Financial Services. The company says this cuts the sales cycle by as much as 70 percent, targeting a dramatic jump in conversions from more than 8,000 non-binding pre-orders that represent theoretical revenue of over 1.6 billion euros. On the firmer side, about 500 confirmed orders from roughly 40 customers form the operational backbone.

Production capacity is ramping fast. With contract manufacturer Celestica, Circus boosted output by 60 percent in the first quarter of 2026 and slashed assembly time for its CA-1 robot to around four weeks. Sixteen units were built in Q1, with a target of 64 per month by the fourth quarter. The company also joined the ETH AI Center’s Entrepreneurship Program alongside Google, Meta, Swisscom and Schneider Electric, aiming to advance its proprietary visual-intelligence models.

Defense orders are emerging as a key growth vector. The Bundeswehr is trialing the CA-1 for autonomous barracks catering, Lithuania awarded a tender for a tactical supply robot in April, and Ukraine is already a customer. Circus says it is in serious discussions with more than ten NATO member states, including Poland and Italy. Its outdoor model, the CA-M, is now expected to generate first revenues this year, two years ahead of schedule.

Yet most of the high-profile pilots remain provisional. REWE is testing the system at a Düsseldorf store but won’t decide on a broader rollout until autumn. Mercedes-Benz gastronomy plans to introduce the robots at its Sindelfingen site in summer 2026. The majority of these initiatives are still not backed by binding supply contracts.

Beyond hardware, Circus is building a software story. CircusOS aims to manage the entire system lifecycle, from demand planning to predictive maintenance, powered by more than 45,000 hours of operational data for its visual-intelligence models. The company is testing Ray-Ban smartglasses with Meta to overlay real-time instructions for kitchen staff. On the cost side, Circus targets an EBITDA loss of 6 to 8 million euros this year, improving from 15 million euros in 2025.

Three analysts cover the stock, all with buy recommendations. The average 12-month price target stands at 35.20 euros, with a range from 19 to 46 euros—a dramatic gap from the current share price.

The next major catalyst arrives in June with the first-quarter 2026 report. Management has forecast full-year revenue of 44 to 55 million euros, based on existing customers and a growing share of higher-margin SaaS subscriptions. That would represent a leap of roughly 200 times from 2025 levels. The report will show how many of the pilot projects have actually converted into binding contracts, and whether the new financing and leasing structure is enough to turn talk into tangible cash flow. For a company burning cash and trading at a deep discount, the numbers will either validate the story or deepen the market’s skepticism.