Hello! Here is what happened today in European tech:
Deals
- Cazoo, the used-car sales platform, reached ‘unicorn’ status after raising a little over $31 million at a $1 billion+ valuation just three months ago. Today, the UK-based company revealed it has raised a further £240 million (€265 million) of funding at more than double the last valuation. The latest round takes the total funding since Cazoo was founded to a whopping £450 million.
- Israeli-founded cybersecurity company Imperva is acquiring American database security company jSonar, founded by Israelis Ron Bennatan and Ury Segal. jSonar announced just four months ago that it had raised a $50 million investment from Goldman Sachs.
- Sendinblue, the Paris-based digital marketing platform, has raised $160 million in new funding. The company called its Series B round the “highest fundraising round for any all-in-one marketing platform in the U.S. and Europe” in a news release. Investors included Bridgepoint, Bpifrance, and Blackrock, with Partech reinvesting from a previous $36 million in Series A in 2017.
- Publicly listed European VC firm Draper Esprit announced a proposed placing to raise gross proceeds of approximately £100 million to "fund an accelerated investment strategy and capture a greater share of technology investment opportunities.”
- Swiss biotech firm SOPHiA GENETICS, which provides genomic and radiomic analysis for hospitals, has raised $110 million in an oversubscribed Series F round led by aMoon, a health-tech & life sciences venture fund based in Israel, and Hitachi Ventures.
- German online fitness and nutrition company 7NXT (Gymondo etc.), with its headquarters in Berlin, has sold a majority stake to the London-based private equity firm Oakley Capital.
- Cisco is making another acquisition to expand its reach in security solutions, this time specifically targeting DevOps and the world of container management. It is acquiring PortShift, an Israeli startup that has built a Kubernetes-native security platform.
- Einride, a Swedish company that wants to put electric autonomous trucks on the road, has raised $10 million in a round led by Norrsken VC. The Stockholm-based company is manufacturing electric trucks that it hopes will one day hit the roads as fully autonomous vehicles.
- Wise, an Italian medical device company developing next-generation implantable leads for neuromonitoring, neuromodulation and brain-machine interfacing, has closed a €15 million Series C financing round.
- Knoma, a London, UK-based startup that helps lifelong learners finance their tech courses by spreading the cost via loans, has launched after raising more than £21 million in debt and equity funding from Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet, Fasanara Capital and Seedrs, along with angel investors such as LendInvest chairman Christian Faes.
- We also tracked a large number of (other) European tech funding rounds and M&A transactions, all of which we are putting in a handy list for you on Friday afternoon in our weekly roundup newsletter (note: the full list is for paying customers only). Also check out our European tech news section for ongoing coverage.
Worth Knowing
- The European Commission has laid out plans to boost the education of citizens in digital skills across the bloc, as part of a drive that it hopes will aid Europe’s long-term economic stability while the continent rebounds from the after-effects of the coronavirus crisis.
- Huawei has failed to adequately tackle security flaws in equipment used in the UK's telecoms networks despite previous complaints, an official report says.
- EU countries which have not assigned 5G spectrum frequencies by the end of 2020 will be in breach of EU law and could face legal action from the Commission, the EU executive has warned.
- State of AI report: what’s next for European tech?
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