These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, we tracked 53 tech funding deals worth more than €590 million, as well as 11 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) Barcelona-born letgo, which provides an app to buy and sell locally, announced today that Naspers has committed to invest $500 million of new capital into the company.

2) The popular French carpooling platform BlaBlaCar is acquiring the Russian startup BeepCar, a carpooling platform launched in 2017 by Mail.Ru Group. The acquisition was announced along with a partnership between the Mail.Ru Group, which is the largest internet business in Russia, and BlaBlaCar.

3) Taxfix, a Berlin, Germany-based provider of a mobile assistant for tax declarations, completed a $13 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Valar Ventures with participation from existing investors Creandum and Redalpine.

4) Samsung has announced that it’s entering a long-term partnership with Spotify, including support for the just-announced Galaxy Home smart speaker. The partnership is described as one that will span all of Samsung’s devices from phones to TVs to speakers.

5) Meanwhile, Warner Music Group announced that it has now sold its entire stake in Spotify, realising $504 million.

6) Instapaper is available again for users in the European Union. Over the past two months, the company says it took a number of actions to "address the General Data Protection Regulation", and is giving six months of Instapaper Premium to all EU users affected by the outage.

7) Unmade, a UK-based fashion software company, has raised $4 million in new funding. The investment was led by Felix Capital, with participation from Connect Ventures, LocalGlobe, Carmen Busquets, Backed VC and C4 Ventures.

8) Speakersbase, the Belgian company behind a platform that connects public speakers and event organisers, is merging with a smaller counterpart to expand internationally. The startup, which bills itself as Europe's largest online provider of public speakers, is joining forces with Ireland-based Speakific, by way of acquisition. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

9) The SoftBank-backed Indian cab-hailing platform Ola is now eyeing the UK market.

10) Navya, a French company that has been a leader in developing autonomous shuttles, announced that it has raised an additional €30 million ($34 million) from the European Investment Bank to continue building out its business.

Bonus link: How Spotify CEO Daniel Ek plans to beat Apple, Amazon, and Google at the music game (Fast Company)