These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

Last week, we tracked 40 tech funding deals worth more than €308 million, as well as 8 M&A transactions 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) Ridesharing company Lyft is in negotiations with Madrid-founded Cabify to acquire it for up to $3 billion, Spanish-language newspaper El Confidencial reported this week, after Uber also reportedly showed interest. A deal with Lyft would supposedly grant Cabify the resources needed to compete with players like Uber and Didi in Latin America, while widening the geographic reach of the American buyer, which currently only operates in the US and Canada.

2) Europe’s hugely controversial new copyright law has been stalled, after members of the European Parliament decided not to fast-track it to the next stage of the legislative process. The controversy about the new copyright directive comes down to two elements: Article 11, which would demand that the likes of Google pay a license fee for quoting text when linking to online news stories, and Article 13, which would force online platforms to actively monitor everything their users upload in order to spot and automatically zap copyright violations.

3) Berlin-headquartered VC firm Earlybird has closed its €175 million “Digital West” fund that will focus on deep tech startups in German-speaking countries, Nordics, UK, Benelux, France and Southern Europe. Meanwhile Draper Esprit, a London-based publicly listed VC firm, has entered into a strategic partnership with Earlybird as a first step to a future merger.

4) Norway-based Opera Limited, a leading provider of web browsers and digital content discovery platforms, has filed with the SEC to raise up to $115 million in an IPO.

5) Barcelona-based 21Buttons, a fashion-centred social shopping app, has raised $17 million in a Series B funding round led by Idinvest Partners. The company's existing investors, including Kibo Ventures, Breega, Samaipata, JME VC, 360 Capital Partners, and Sabadell VC, also participated in the round.

6) UK Digital Secretary Matt Hancock visited Paris to announce a package of measures to strengthen ties between the UK and France’s digital industries. The aim is to boost both countries’ digital economies and forge closer links between cutting-edge companies from both nations.

7) UK-based Micro Focus is selling its Germany-based Linux distribution vendor SUSE to growth investment firm EQT Partners for a total cash consideration of $2.535 billion.

8) Uber said it will relaunch its ride-hailing services in Finland following a year-long suspension, after a new transportation law came into effect this week.

9) ThetaRay, a big data analytics company based in Israel, has announced that it raised more than $30 million in a funding round led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), GE, Bank Hapoalim, OurCrowd, SVB Investments, and others. That puts its fundraising total to date at about $60 million.

10) London-founded industrial IoT (IIoT) analytics startup Oden Technologies has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Atomico, with participation from existing investors including EQT Ventures and Inbox Capital. Niklas Zennström, Atomico CEO and co-founder of Skype, will join the company's board.

Bonus link: European tech funding starts out strong and steady in first half of 2018