These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, we tracked 54 tech funding deals worth more than €275 million, as well as 9 M&A transactions and 1 IPO across Europe (including Russia, 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) Property portal Zoopla — a leader in the UK market with 50 million visits across its apps and sites, and 25,000 business partners integrated with its platform — has announced that Silver Lake has made a cash offer of 490 pence per share for the company, equivalent to about £2.2 billion ($3 billion at current rates).

2) Britain’s Vodafone agreed to a nearly $23 billion deal to buy operations in four European countries from Liberty Global, a merger that would create one of the continent’s biggest telecommunications carriers.

3) Apple has ditched plans to build an 850 million euro ($1 billion) data centre in Ireland because of delays in the approval process that have stalled the project for more than three years.

4) iZettle, the payments and small business financial services startup that is often referred to as the “Square of Europe,” with some 413,000 business customers, this week confirmed plans to list on Nasdaq in Stockholm. The company plans to raise 2 billion Swedish kronor ($227 million at current rates), giving it an estimated valuation of about SEK10 billion ($1.1 billion).

5) Google will acquire Israel-based Velostrata, which specializes in helping companies move their internal corporate infrastructure to cloud providers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Velostrata’s 25 employees will join Google’s office in Tel Aviv. Velostrata has raised about $31.5 million since it debuted in 2014, according to deal-tracking service PitchBook.

6) Spotify has announced a new hate content and hateful conduct policy as it looks to distance itself from controversial music artists that are available on its streaming platform. Additionally, the company said it has built an automated monitoring tool it calls Spotify AudioWatch to find content already on its platform that has been flagged as hate content elsewhere around the world.

7) Hamburg-based cruise booking platform Dreamlines has raised €45 million in Series E funding. The investment was led by Princeville Global, with participation from existing investors including Holtzbrinck Ventures, Target Global, Dimaventures, Hasso Plattner Ventures, TruVenturo and Global Founders.

8) British augmented reality startup Blippar is abandoning Silicon Valley after shutting its third international office in the space of two years as it struggles to nail down its business model. The company announced it would shutter its Mountain View, California office and shift technical development to its London and Bangalore offices.

9) London-based edtech startup Fuse Universal, which provides mobile learning technology for workplaces, has raised $20 million in growth capital from Eight Roads Ventures.

10) BT will cut 13,000 managerial and back-office jobs and move to a smaller London base in the latest attempt by the boss of Britain’s biggest telecoms group to rebuild from an accounting scandal and multiple pressures on its business.

Bonus link: Meet Xavier Niel, The Tech Billionaire Turning France Into A Startup Mecca (Forbes)