These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, our research team tracked over 60 tech funding deals worth more than €800 million, as well as several M&A transactions across Europe, including Russia, Israel, and Turkey.

We listed every single deal in our weekly newsletter. Here’s an extra overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) Finnish telecommunications company Nokia has secured a €250 million loan from the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) for its research and development related to 5G products until 2020, concentrating particularly on “developing new 5G-related end-to-end product offerings for different business areas".

2) Apple has acquired Platoon, the London-based creative services firm founded in 2016 by music industry veteran Denzyl Feigelson and LoveFilm co-founder, Saul Klein.

3) Oura Health, a sleep-tracking and sleep-improvement platform, has surpassed $20 million in a funding round led by MSD Capital with participation from YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Sunrise founder Dave Morin, JUMP founder Ryan Rzepecki and others. This round comes a couple of years after the Finnish company raised €5 million from MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito and others.

4) Berlin-based casual games maker Wooga has been acquired by Israeli mobile games studio Playtika. With the move, half of Playtika’s titles will now be casual games, as the company seeks to diversify into new genres. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Venturebeat reports that the purchase price is north of $100 million.

5) A trade union lost a UK court bid for the right to lobby Deliveroo over pay and conditions on behalf of the food-delivery service’s riders, in a rare setback for workers in the so-called gig economy.

6) Germany-based digital fitness company Freeletics announced that it has raised $45 million in Series A funding led by FitLab, Causeway Media Partners, and JAZZ Venture Partners. Courtside Ventures, Elysian Park Ventures, ward.ventures, and Tony Robbins also participated in this round.

7) Bristol-founded startup Ultrahaptics that has created a mid-air haptic feedback technology has raised £35 million in a Series C funding round led by Mayfair Equity Partners, with participation from Hostplus, IP Group plc, Woodford Investment, Cornes, and Dolby Family Ventures.

8) Authorities in Madrid have revoked the licenses of the electric scooter sharing companies Lime, Wind, and Voi and has ordered the companies to remove all scooters from city streets within 72 hours.

9) Wing, the drone delivery X project that “graduated” into full company status under the Alphabet umbrella this past July, is taking flight in Europe. It has announced that it will start a new pilot in Finland beginning in the spring of 2019 in Helsinki, delivering goods and packages of up to 1.5 kilograms within a distance of up to 10 kilometers.

10) Berlin-based workflow automation startup Camunda has raised its first funding round of €25 million from Highland Europe. The company plans to use the capital injection for international expansion across the US, Europe, and Asia.

Podcast: tech.eu Podcast #98: Uber’s new fine; appetising insects; interview with Gravity’s Panayiotis Philimis; makers movement strikes back; and much more

Bonus link: European tech firms have raised a record $23 billion in 2018: The State of European Tech Report