Happy Friday!
This week, tech.eu tracked 16 technology M&A transactions and 66 tech funding deals totalling €211 million in Europe, Turkey and Israel.
Like every week, we listed every single one of them in our free weekly newsletter, along with interesting news regarding fledgling European startups, tech investors old and new, a number of good reads published elsewhere, government and policy news, as well as an overview of interesting lists, facts and figures from a wide variety of sources.
You can subscribe to our newsletter below to receive all this information in your inbox every Friday afternoon for free, but here’s an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:
1) Spotify now has 50 million paid subscribers.
2) The UK government has outlined how it plans to support the UK tech industry post-Brexit. The Department for Media, Culture, and Sport published its Digital Strategy document last Wednesday as the UK prepares to exit the EU.
3) ResearchGate, the Berlin-based social network for scientists and researchers, has raised $52.6 million from several investors including Wellcome Trust, Goldman Sachs, and Four Rivers Group. Other participants in the round included Ashton Kutcher, Groupe Arnault, Xavier Niel, and existing investors Bill Gates, Tenaya Capital, Benchmark, and Founders Fund.
4) Uber has lost a court battle to stop a London regulator from forcing private hire drivers to prove their reading and writing skills in English
5) Palo Alto Networks has announced its acquisition of the Israeli cybersecurity company LightCyber for $105 million.
6) Google’s Launchpad Accelerator has expanded to Africa and Europe (more specifically to Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary).
7) HMD Global, the Finnish company that licensed the rights to produce Nokia phones, has unveiled a trio of Nokia-branded Android devices designed to cater for the mid-range of the smartphone market.
8) SoundCloud has rebooted its paid membership plan with a new budget option less than a year after it launched. The Berlin-based company revealed a cheaper tier of $4.99 per month, down from the initial $9.99 subscription that it rolled out in March 2016.
9) It emerged that Finnish mobile games and animation studio Rovio swung to an annual profit in 2016 as its Angry Birds movie release helped boost its game sales.
10) French fashion site Showroomprivé has acquired beauty site Beauté Privée.
Bonus link: Europe has the largest cluster of machine intelligence startups outside of the US.
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments