These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, we tracked 45 tech funding deals worth more than €266 million, as well as 13 M&A transactions and 1 IPO across Europe (including Turkey, Russia 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) Spotify reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company. The company posted a total user base of 170 million, with 75 million paid subscribers, in line with expectations. But the company is still losing money, and also gave guidance for the current quarter that was slightly lighter than estimates, sending its shares tumbling.

2) Frontier Car Group, a Berlin-based startup which develops, backs and operates used-car marketplaces in various emerging markets, has raised more than $41 million in Series B funding from Balderton, TPG Growth and others. In addition, the company announced that it has raised an additional $17 million in debt financing from a number of lending institutions and banks.

3) Cambridge Analytica, the British data firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, is shutting down following allegations about its misuse of Facebook data and the campaign tactics it pitched to clients.

4) Meanwhile, the UK parliament has issued an impressive ultimatum to Facebook in a last-ditch attempt to get Mark Zuckerberg to take its questions: Come and give evidence voluntarily or next time you fly to the UK you’ll get a formal summons to appear.

5) The popular messaging app Telegram has brought in so much money from a small group of private investors that it is calling off a planned sale of cryptocurrency to the wider investing public, the WSJ reported this week. The company has pulled in $1.7 billion by selling newly created cryptocurrency to fewer than 200 private investors.

6) Nokia said it has entered into exclusive negotiations to sell its digital health hardware and services division to Eric Carreel, the co-founder and former chairman of Withings, after both Samsung and Google both reportedly also sniffed around. Withings formed the core of the division after Nokia acquired the French startup in 2016 for €170 million.

7) Ahead of GDPR, EU data watchdog says internet platforms that collect user data are like “sweatshops” exploiting users in exchange for so called “free” services.

8) Groupon has announced an acquisition to ramp up its operations in discount offers and specifically those tied to loyalty programs. The company has acquired Bristol, UK-based Cloud Savings Company, the owner of Vouchercloud and Giftcloud, in a deal that Groupon said has an enterprise value of $65 million.

9) Starship, the British-Estonian robotics company founded by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, has launched a global rollout of autonomous delivery services for corporate and academic campuses that will see the deployment of more than 1,000 delivery robots by the end of this year.

10) In March, Google issued some indications of how it intends to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), going into effect in about a month. Now, four major publisher trade groups have released a five-page joint letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai with a basic message: nope.

Bonus link: A French-born American has sued his home country because, he claims, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has illegally seized a domain that he’s owned since 1994: France.com.