These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, our research team tracked almost 70 tech funding deals worth over €1.4 billion, along with a dozen 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 (subscribe to our free newsletter to get this roundup in your inbox every Monday morning):

1) AUTO1 Group, the European digital used-car trading platform, has raised €255 million from investors and would use the money to develop its retail brand Autohero.

2) Confirmed: UK-based financial technology business TransferWise has been valued at $5 billion in a secondary share sale, confirming its position as one of the most valuable private fintech businesses in Europe. TransferWise said on Wednesday that existing shareholders and some employees sold $319 million worth of shares to investors looking to buy in or expand their shareholding.

3) Cloud communications platform company Infobip has reportedly secured north of $200 million from private equity firm One Equity Partners in a deal which values the Croatia-based scale-up at over $1 billion.

4) Facebook is suing EU antitrust regulators for seeking information beyond what is necessary - including highly personal details - for their investigations into the company’s data and marketplace, it said on Monday.

5) Since being re-acquired from Nokia in 2018 by a group including its original founders and some of its original investors, French health tech company Withings has been focused on evolving their offering of consumer health hardware to provide medical-grade data that can be shared with, and leveraged by healthcare professionals. The company has now raised another $60 million to continue pursuing that goal, a Series B funding round co-led by Glide Healthcare.

6) Telegram, the messaging app, has become the latest company to file a formal antitrust complaint to the EU over Apple’s App Store. In a complaint to EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager, Telegram, which has more than 400 million users, said Apple must “allow users to have the opportunity of downloading software outside of the App Store.”

7) The European Union has imposed (its first-ever economical) sanctions against China, Russia, and North Korea for past cyber-attacks carried out against European citizens and businesses.

8) Banking technology company Thought Machine has secured an additional $42 million in funding for the series B round of funding it announced last March, which is due to close at a total of $125 million in early August. Eurazeo Growth is leading the extension, with British Patient Capital and Thought Machine customer SEB also coming in as new investors.

9) Germany-founded business software giant SAP plans to spin off and float Qualtrics, the US specialist in measuring online customer sentiment that it acquired less than two years ago for $8 billion.

10) ComplyAdvantage, a London-based startup working in financial crime detection, has closed a $50 million Series C funding round that will fuel rapid product and market expansion across the United States, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.

Podcast(s):

tech.eu Podcast #179: about eBay/Adevinta and e-scooters, a rant on the EU budget and a chat with Accel’s Philippe Botteri

Bonus link(s): The new edition of Pitchbook's European Venture Report examines trends in dealmaking, exits, and fundraising in the region, with a spotlight on the UK & Ireland. Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, European VC deal value notched the third-largest quarterly figure on record in Q2 2020.