These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, we tracked 47 tech funding deals worth more than €220 million, as well as 6 M&A transactions and 2 IPOs across Europe (including Russia, Turkey and Israel).

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) Daimler and BMW, rivals in the luxury-car business, are joining forces to bolster their on-demand transportation entries against competition from Uber and others. The German auto makers said last Wednesday they will form a joint-venture company that combines Daimler’s Car2Go and BMW’s DriveNow car-sharing providers, as well as ride-hailing services such as Daimler’s Moovel and MyTaxi and others.

2) French President Emmanuel Macron promised 1.5 billion euros ($1.85 billion) of public funding into artificial intelligence by 2022 in a bid to reverse a brain drain and catch up with the dominant US and Chinese tech giants.

3) Messaging app Telegram has raised an additional $850 million for its initial coin offering, according to documents filed with the SEC on Thursday. The funding means that Telegram has raised a total of $1.7 billion so far for what will likely be the largest ICO in history.

4) Spotify, which is about to go public, believes it will end 2018 with as many as 96 million paid subscribers, up from 71 million last year (that would be an increase of up to 36%). The company also thinks revenue could hit $6.6 billion, up 30 percent.

5) Intercom, the Irish developers of customer communications tools, has raised $125 million in a Series D round that values the company at $1.275 billion. The round was led by Silicon Valley firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with participation from Google Ventures.

6) Oh Brexit ... In an official statement Thursday, the European Commission announced it will cancel all 300,000 domains under the .eu top-level domain that have a UK registrant, following Britain's eventual departure from the European Union.

7) The MariaDB Corporation, which was founded by MySQL founder Monty Widenius and which offers all of its database software under an open source license, has acquired MammothDB, a big data business analytics service based in Bulgaria.

8) Samsung has invested $4.6 million as part of a partnership with AudioBurst, a Tel Aviv-based startup that develops an audio content search engine. AudioBurst announced the partnership on Wednesday. As part of the partnership, AudioBurst’s technology will be integrated into Samsung’s products on a global scale, starting with the company’s smart TVs.

9) Verbit, a transcription software startup from Israel, has announced a $11 million seed round from HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Vertex Ventures, and Orzyn Capital. The company, founded last year, develops software for transcribing audio and video content using AI; though it also uses human editors to make corrections and help refine the algorithms.

10) Nokia said on Thursday it had decided to cut 353 jobs in its home market Finland this year due to a weak global network market and as part of its global cost-savings plan.

Bonus link: Explainer: Spotify listing could be roller coaster for retail investors (Reuters)