Happy Friday! This week, tech.eu tracked 17 technology M&A transactions and 57 funding deals (totalling €340 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) British-Portuguese fashion e-commerce giant Farfetch has fetched $110 million in fresh (Series F) funding to fuel expansion. The financing deal reportedly values Farfetch at approximately $1.5 billion.
2) European counterterrorism officials say American laws and corporate policies are hampering their efforts to prevent the next attack, because legal procedures for getting international evidence from US-based social-media firms are dangerously outdated (WSJ).
3) Jolla, the Finnish developer of an open mobile OS dubbed Sailfish, announced that it has secured new financing to re-boost its operating system licensing business. In total, the company says it has raised $12 million in funding since last December, enabling it to hire new software developers and strengthen product development for future projects.
4) Berlin-based SoundCloud launched its new consumer subscription offering, dubbed SoundCloud Go, in the UK and Ireland, following an initial debut of the service in the United States a little over a month ago. SoundCloud also introduced advertising on its free service in those countries.
5) Two big American tech firms bought European companies this week: eBay acquired AI-powered big data processor Expertmaker (Sweden), while Microsoft announced that it has acquired Solair, an Italy-based IoT service provider.
6) British music technology company Roli has closed a $27 million Series B funding round led by Foundry Group.
7) France’s railway company - SNCF - turned out to be among the backers of Hyperloop Technologies, the innovative high-speed transportation company.
8) Following an extremely bad week for Rocket Internet (and consequently for Kinnevik, a major investor in the company and several of the e-commerce companies spawned by the Berlin-based incubator), the former removed two representatives of the latter from its supervisory board.
9) Celebrity acquisitions as Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy's company - Wayin - bought UK-based marketing tech company EngageSciences, while i.am+, the fashion tech company/brand established by musician and entrepreneur will.i.am acquired an Israeli startup specialised in context-aware technology for mobile and wearable devices called Sensiya.
10) France’s SIGFOX, which deploys wireless communications networks that are specifically tailored to the Internet of Things, has accelerated its plans to roll out across the US, plotting to launch in 100 cities by the end of this year.
Bonus link: Estonia wants to become a 'country as a service' and already has 10,000 virtual residents (Business Insider)
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