Happy Friday!
This week, our research team tracked 78 funding deals and around 10 M&A announcements and rumours across Europe, including Russia, Israel, and Turkey. As always, we are putting all of them together for you in a handy list sent in our Friday afternoon roundup newsletter (note: the full list is for paying customers only).
Recently, we also started publishing 'Today in European Tech', a daily roundup of deals and news stories that caught our attention. Keeping you updated on all things EU tech is our priority!
Today, instead of a daily roundup we give you an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for the past week (subscribe to our free newsletter to get this roundup in your inbox every Monday morning):
1)
On Thursday, Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek announced in a Node by Slush fireside chat that he's devoting €1 billion of his personal resources to fund ground-breaking startups to generate more European super-companies.
2)
Yandex — Russia’s largest technology company — is set to buy challenger bank Tinkoff in a $5.5 billion deal that would become one of the most high-profile Russian tie-ups in recent corporate history.
3)
French startup Mirakl has raised a $300 million funding round led by private equity firm Permira at a $1.5 billion valuation — the company is now a unicorn. Mirakl helps you launch and manage a marketplace on your e-commerce website.
4)
Point taken: Germany-based Point Nine, a pan-European and US focused VC firm that specialises in B2B SaaS and marketplace investments, has closed a new €100 million seed fund (technically €99,999,999) dubbed ‘P9 V’. You guessed it, this is the firm’s fifth fund since its founding in 2011.
5)
On the roadshow: UK food-delivery startup Deliveroo has begun preliminary talks to explore an initial public offering, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
6)
Finnish space tech startup Iceye has raised €74 million in fresh funding in a round led by return investor True Ventures, with a significant additional investment by OTB Ventures. ICEYE has so far launched 5 satellite missions, starting with the first ever small SAR satellite launched in January 2018.
7)
TransferWise‘s business has been ramping up quite nicely, as it currently handles over £4 billion in cross-border payments every month from more than 8 million customers. The UK-based fintech scale-up today announced its results for the past financial year, reporting a 70% rise in revenue to hit £302.6 million, and a nice little net profit of £21.3 million for the fiscal year, which ended March 2020.
8)
Very Kindred of you: London VC Kindred Capital has closed its second seed fund at £81 million and announced that, through its ‘Equitable Venture’ program, about £5 million is going back to the entrepreneurs rather than Kindred’s general partners. The firm gives seed-stage founders co-ownership in the fund that invested in their businesses.
9)
The European Commission has set out plans to create what its officials described as the world’s most comprehensive set of rules for crypto-assets and their underlying blockchain technology.
10)
On the back of raising $200 million, UK-based software scale-up Snyk has announced its acquisition of DeepCode, a Swiss provider of real-time semantic code analysis powered by AI. By acquiring ETH Zurich spin-off DeepCode and its technology, Snyk aims to boost both the speed and overall intelligence of its ‘developer-first’ security platform.
Podcast:
tech.eu Podcast #187: In this episode, we talked about some of the biggest stories in European tech from the past week, including the Nvidia/Arm deal and Klarna’s behemoth funding round. Also check out an interview with Meri Williams, CTO at Healx, formerly of Monzo, Moo, and the UK government.
Bonus link:
As the European tech ecosystems continue to mature, the US has seemingly lost its relocation shine, and local tech startups are no longer hellbent on expanding their R&D ops across the Atlantic. That is the main conclusion of new research done by international investment firm Index Ventures, which has surveyed more than 100 European startups and analysed the transatlantic expansion strategies of more than 275 companies in total.
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