Happy Saturday!
This week, our research team tracked over 60 tech funding deals worth more than €900 million, as well as a bunch of 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) London-based small business lender iwoca has raised £150 million. The round consists of £20 million in equity funding from Augmentum Fintech and Prime Ventures, and £130 million in debt capital from NIBC Bank.
2) Just hours after Palo Alto Networks said it was acquiring Israeli startup Demisto, Google Cloud revealed that it was buying Israel’s Alooma. The US company didn’t reveal the price it was paying for Alooma, which helps corporate customers migrate their data to the cloud, but sources estimated it is $150 million.
3) Paris-based agritech startup Ÿnsect, which produces insect-based animal food, has landed a mega-round of $125 million led by Astanor Ventures, with participation from Bpifrance, Talis Capital, Idinvest Partners, Finasucre, and Compagnie du Bois Sauvage. This capital injection brings the total amount raised by the company to $175 million.
4) Japan’s SoftBank Group has provided nearly half of the cash for Abu Dhabi’s state investor Mubadala Investment Co’s new $400 million fund investing in European startups.
5) Paris-based startup Alan has raised a Series B round of funding of $45 million (€40 million). Index Ventures is once again leading the round, with partners of DST Global also participating. Alan is a software-as-a-service startup tackling a very specific industry: the health insurance market in France — and soon across Europe.
6) NordicNinja VC has launched a €100 million VC fund in partnership with Panasonic, Honda, Omron, and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), to invest in scale-ups in the Nordics and Baltics. The fund will also focus on helping the startups to enter the ecosystems in Japan and across Asia.
7) British security officials do not support a full ban of Huawei from national telecoms networks despite US allegations that the Chinese firm and its products could be used by Beijing for spying.
8) Finnish start-up Varjo launched its first virtual reality (VR) headset on Tuesday in a bid to capture the growing industrial market for the technology, despite slow pick-up among consumers. The $5,995 headset will be sold directly to businesses in industries like architecture, engineering and construction.
9) Eight years after raising its first $30 million fund, 212 is back in the market with a $30 million first close for its latest fund focused on investments in Turkish and Eastern European startups.
10) Vilnius-founded mobility platform Trafi has announced the launch of a new multimodal mobility app called Jelbi in partnership with BVG, the main public transport company in Berlin. The app is expected to launch in early summer this year. Jelbi will allow urban travellers to switch between different modes of transportation — such as public transport, shared e-scooters and bikes, taxis, and car-sharing solutions — without having to jump between different apps.
Podcast: tech.eu Podcast #106: Fintech in Lithuania, Revolut’s banking licence, Malt funding, the future of work, interview with MEP Julia Reda, and more
Bonus link: Inside the London tech scene's frantic plan to stop Brexit (Wired)
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