These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, our research team tracked more than 70 tech funding deals worth over €1.2 billion, as well as some 15 M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe, including Russia, Israel, and Turkey. Meanwhile, here's an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) Amsterdam-based Tiqets, the platform for booking tickets to museums and other cultural attractions, has announced a $60 million Series C round, led by Airbnb with support from prior investors HPE Growth Capital and Investion.

2) Sberbank, Russia’s state-controlled financial giant, intends to purchase a $170 million stake in Mail.ru Group. The deal will see Sberbank buy into a company called MF Technologies, which owns a majority of Mail.Ru’s voting rights, from Gazprombank — another state-owned Russian financial outfit.

3) London-based VC firm Frog Capital has announced the first close of its second scale-up fund, which is expected to accumulate over €150 million.

4) Tired of its businesses turning to foreign cloud-computing providers such as the Google, Microsoft and Amazon, the German government is leading the push for a European cloud network called Gaia-X, which is meant to ultimately strengthen the competitiveness of European industry on international markets.

5) UiPath has fired “just under 400 employees”, according to a company spokesperson. The Romania-born player in the RPA market attracted $568 million in Series D funding earlier this year.

6) IDnow, German provider of Identity Verification-as-a-Service (IVAAS), has raised a $40 million funding round from Corsair Capital. The Munich-based tech company develops AI-powered identity verification solutions for enterprise businesses.

7) Berlin-based Omio (formerly known as GoEuro) has acquired multimodal travel veteran Rome2rio as it works on building out a global travel aggregator business, having taken the decision to zoom out from its home market of Europe earlier this year.

8) Duffel, a British travel tech company, has raised a $30 million Series B to grow its platform and change the infrastructure behind online travel booking. The round was led by Index Ventures and joined by Benchmark Capital and Blossom Capital.

9) Prophesee, the Paris-based company developing computer vision technology, has raised a $28 million Series C, led by European Investment Bank with participation from iBionext, 360 Capital Partners, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, and Supernova Invest.

10) Duality Technologies, the US-Israeli company providing privacy-preserving data analysis tools, has announced a $16 million Series A led by Intel Capital with support from Hearst Ventures and existing investor, Team8.

Podcast: tech.eu Podcast #140: Volocopter’s air taxi ambition, Startupbootcamp and public exchange, sauna parties at tech events, interview with Seedcamp’s Carlos Espinal

Bonus link: What’s driving Europe’s new aggressive stance on tech (Politico)