These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, we tracked 106 tech funding deals worth more than €530 million, as well as 7 M&A transactions, 5 IPOs, and 1 ICO across Europe, Israel, and Turkey.

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

1) VC firm Draper Esprit has acquired two of Seedcamp’s funds for €20 million. The firm acquired Seedcamp Funds I and II, which includes a stake in Transferwise and a number of smaller startups like Codacy and Winnow.

2) Responding to US government suggestions that its antivirus software has been used for surveillance of customers, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab is launching what it’s calling a transparency initiative to allow independent third parties to review its source code and business practices and to assure the information security community that it can be trusted.

3) Israeli-founded cybersecurity company Skybox Security has raised $150 million in a round led by Luxembourg private equity firm CVC Capital Partners.

4) The European Union is asking its citizens to help decide on a fairer tax regime for large digital corporations that may include a tax on their global profits.

5) ING, a Dutch financial institution, has raised 300 million euros for ING Ventures, a fintech-focused fund. Benoit Legrand, ING’s global fintech head, has been named CEO of ING Ventures.

6) French insurance tech SaaS firm Shift Technology has raised $28 million in a Series B round led by Accel and General Catalyst with participation from Elaia Partners and Iris Capital.

7) Amazon has announced it will open a research center in Germany that’s focused on developing artificial intelligence to improve the customer experience.

8) Polish edtech company Brainly, developers of a peer-to-peer learning platform, has raised $14 million led by Kulczyk Investments with participation from previous investors Naspers, General Catalyst, Point Nine Capital, and Runa Capital. In addition to the investment, the company confirmed that it has reached 100 million monthly users.

9) Luxembourg’s simpleshow, an explainer video producer, has raised $15 million from BIP. The company develops tools for creating explainer videos and last year released mysimpleshow.com, which automatically creates videos from text.

10) Nokia reported a sharp drop in quarterly earnings at its main telecom network gear business on Thursday, warning the market had turned more challenging due to tough competition in China and consolidation among wireless carriers.

Bonus link: The European Tech Alliance is carrying out a short five-minute survey to take the pulse of the European app economy and see how forthcoming regulation might impact the shape of business models of startups and SMEs.