Happy Friday!
Our research team tracked 50 tech funding deals worth more than €382 million, as well as two 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 last week:
1) Funding Circle was little changed in its first day of trading Friday after pricing its IPO at the bottom end of its price range. The eight-year-old British online loan provider’s offering valued the company at 1.5 billion pounds ($2 billion), compared with an initial aspiration of as much as 2 billion pounds.
2) Amazon is understood to have held two sets of early stage discussions with Deliveroo with a view to an acquisition, as the UK-based food delivery company is also circled by Uber.
3) Apple now officially owns Shazam, announcing on Monday that its acquisition of UK-based Shazam has closed, and that it plans to make the music recognition service available ad-free to consumers soon.
4) Seba Crypto, a Swiss financial services company run by ex-UBS bankers, said it raised money as it seeks to become one of the world’s first regulated banks to let consumers easily swap dollars and euros into cryptocurrency. The Zug-headquartered company said it secured 100 million Swiss francs ($104 million) from private and institutional investors for the venture, which is dependent on being granted a banking license from Finma, the Swiss financial regulator.
5) UK-based cybersecurity firm Darktrace has raised $50 million in a recent round of venture capital funding, putting the five-year-old company’s valuation at $1.65 billion. This recent round of funding was led by Vitruvian Partners, and was backed by the company’s existing investors KKR and 1011 Ventures.
6) Music streaming services Spotify and Deezer joined European business and industry bodies in calling on EU regulators to take tougher action to curb what they say are the unfair practices of online platforms.
7) Instana, a German startup that automates application performance monitoring, has secured $30 million in a funding round led by Meritech Capital with participation from Accel, which also led its previous $20 million round. The capital injection will be used to expand the company’s product line.
8) French business banking startup for small and medium enterprises Qonto has raised €20 million in a round led by its existing investors Valar Ventures and Alven with participation from the European Investment Bank Group.
9) Google, Yandex and other prominent Internet companies in Russia are discussing the creation of a database of infringing content including movies, TV shows, games, and software. The idea is that the companies will automatically query this database every five minutes with a view to removing such content from search results within six hours, no court order required.
10) The British newspaper industry’s trade body has said the government should force social media sites such as Facebook and Google to pay an annual financial levy to fund journalism, and set up a regulator that would force them to take legal responsibility for all the content on their platforms.
Bonus link: How a new EU copyright law could weaken privacy and free speech (IAPP)
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