These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

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Happy Friday!

Last week, we tracked 62 tech funding deals worth more than €331 million, as well as 13 M&A transactions and 1 IPO across Europe, including Russia, Israel, and Turkey.

We listed every single deal in our weekly newsletter (note: the full newsletter is now available to paying subscribers only). Here’s an extra overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) TourRadar, the Vienna, Austria-headquartered online travel agency (OTA) that targets the multi-day touring market, has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

2) The European Commission has signed an agreement with four major online retailers - AliExpress, Amazon, eBay and Rakuten-France - to combat the listing of dangerous products on Europe’s online shopping sites.

3) Uber has been granted a short-term licence to operate in London following a court hearing. Transport for London (TfL) refused to renew the licence when it expired last September, saying the US taxi app was not a "fit and proper" operator. Uber has now been awarded a licence but it has been put on probation for 15 months.

4) Munich-founded startup Celonis has raised a funding round of $50 million from its existing investors, Accel and 83North. The deal values Celonis at $1 billion and brings the total amount raised by the company to $77.5 million. Founded in 2011, Celonis specialises in process mining, which is a kind of big data analytics aimed at visualising and making sense of enterprise business processes, including core operations like logistics, production and finance.

5) Highland Europe, a VC firm with American roots headquartered in London and Geneva, has raised a €463 million fund, bringing its assets under management to a total of €1.1 billion. While investing from the new fund, the firm will keep its focus on growth-stage “software and internet-enabled companies.”

6) BP plans to acquire the UK’s largest electric vehicle charging company, the latest in a string of acquisitions by major oil companies in the growing market for greener transport. The British oil major entered into an agreement to buy Chargemaster, which has more than 6,500 charging points across the UK, for about 130 million pounds ($170 million).

7) Paris and San Francisco-based Dreem has scored a €31 million funding round from healthcare juggernaut Johnson & Johnson, Bpifrance and its early backers, bringing total raised to €53 million. Dreem boasts a team of 70+ sleep researchers, engineers and other smart people to combine neuro-science with advanted tech and help you, essentially, sleep better.

8) Lumo, a platform for crowdfunding of renewable energy projects, has been acquired by the French bank Societe Generale for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition would allow Societe Generale to “better support its major energy clients in developing their projects as requested by the French government’s Renewable Energy Liberation Plan,” it stated in a press release.

9) Spotify has hired Dawn Ostroff, a veteran television and video executive, as its new chief content officer, a move that may signal the music service’s wider ambitions in media.

10) French mobile game startup Oh BiBi has secured a Series B funding round of $21 million led by Atomico with participation from Korelya Capital. Atomico partner Mattias Ljungman, Atomico venture partner Alexis Bonte, and Korelya Capital partner Paul Degueuse will join the Oh BiBi board as part of the deal.

Bonus link: European regulators report sharp rise in complaints after GDPR (The Guardian)

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