These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, tech.eu tracked 3 technology M&A transactions and 76 tech funding deals totalling about €507 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) French payments specialist Ingenico announced that it is to buy Stockholm-based rival Bambora from Nordic Capital for 1.5 billion euros.

2) UK-based fintech startup Receipt Bank, which creates accounting technology, has raised $50 million in a Series B financing round from the New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

3) Viber has acquired San Francisco startup Chatter Commerce, makers of the ShopChat keyboard, for an undisclosed amount.

4) Cyprian fintech startup Capital.com has raised $25 million from Larnabel Enterprises and VP Capital and launched its mobile trading app.

5) EU judges will have to decide whether Alphabet's Google has to remove certain web search results globally to comply with a previous privacy ruling after France's supreme administrative court referred the issue to the top EU court.

6) Russian private equity firm Finstar has announced plans to invest $150 million in fintech startups over the next five years. Finstar will invest between $500,000 and $30 million in three to six deals a year in seed and Series A rounds.

7) The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) heard arguments on Wednesday over whether to allow a class action suit against Facebook, brought by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems - and about 25,000 other users across the globe.

8) UK startup Graphcore, a machine intelligence company, has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Atomico.

9) The London Stock Exchange Group has teamed up with IBM to build a blockchain-based platform to digitally issue private shares of small and medium enterprises in Italy.

10) FinLeap, the fintech venture hub, has raised €39 million led by financial services firm Signal Iduna, Japan’s SBI Group, NIBC Bank, and existing investor Hannover Re.

Bonus link: How music streaming service SoundCloud ended up on the brink of extinction (Business Insider)