These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Sunday!

This week, we tracked 64 tech funding deals worth more than €829 million, as well as 13 M&A transactions and 2 ICOs 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). Here’s an extra overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) German online car marketplace Auto1 has raised €460 million from Japanese giant SoftBank. The Berlin-based company develops a platform for buying and selling used cars.

2) Rocket Internet-backed German online furniture retailer Home24 is reportedly planning an initial public offering on the stock market for this summer.

3) Telegram is reportedly planning to gatecrash the cryptocurrency world with a blockbuster ten-figure ICO. The company, which reaches more than 170 million monthly users, is looking to raise at least $1.2 billion from a token sale which would include a private sale set for February 2018 and public sale in March.

4) France's Ledger, a maker of bitcoin storage hardware, has raised $75 million led by Draper Esprit.

5) Spotify, the world’s largest paid music service, will begin offering news and political coverage to lure listeners away from radio and podcasts from rival Apple. Eight companies, including BuzzFeed and Refinery29, have agreed to produce programming for the new initiative, called Spotlight.

6) Italy’s antitrust body said on Thursday it had opened a probe into allegations that Apple and Samsung used software updates to slow their mobile phones and push clients into buying new handsets.

7) A contraceptive app from a Swedish startup used by more than 500,000 women has come under fire after reportedly causing 37 unwanted pregnancies. Stockholm's Södersjukhuset hospital has reported the Natural Cycles app to the Swedish Medical Products Agency (the government body tasked with the regulation of medical devices).

8) Swedish fashion e-commerce firm NA-KD has announced a $45 million Series B round led by Partech Ventures.

9) Qualcomm has won antitrust approval in the EU (and South Korea) for its $39 billion acquisition of NXP Semiconductors after agreeing to a package of measures to assuage regulators’ competition concerns.

10) Uber said on Tuesday that its British drivers will have to take a six-hour break after they have accepted and made trips with passengers totalling 10 hours as the taxi app responds to criticism over excessive working hours.

Bonus link: Why Saul Klein wants to continue investing in UK tech (UKTN)