Happy Friday!
This week, our research team tracked about 75 tech funding deals worth over €700 million, along with 10 M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories 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)
Israel-based mobile games company Playtika has submitted a confidential filing for an IPO on Wall Street. The company said it had not yet decided on the size of the offering but Reuters reports that Playtika will try to raise $1 billion at a company valuation of $10 billion.
2)
Danish financial services platform Lunar (formerly known as LunarWay) has raised €40 million in funding. Lunar intends to launch a BNPL (buy now pay later) service targeted at existing 5,000 business users and 200,000 private users across Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
3)
The rapid rise in the share price of Germany's TeamViewer has apparently inspired its major shareholder to make cash. The investment vehicle TigerLuxOne, advised by Permira, has announced the successful sale of more than 11% of the share capital of the provider of remote maintenance and video software (gross proceeds are just under €1 billion).
4)
Overall, European venture funding is down 17% for the first three quarters of 2020 compared with the peak funding year of 2019, according to Crunchbase Data.
5)
After two years of building and a year-long beta that included more than 25,000 teams, and backed by more than $50 million in funding, the content collaboration and presentation software Pitch launched to the public.
6)
UVC Partners has launched a new €150-million fund to invest in industrial tech, B2B software, and mobility startups.
7)
Microsoft announced a 'significant commitment to drive local innovation and growth in Austria', including plans to establish its first datacenter region in the country. The company also announced a new 'Center of Digital Excellence' to modernize Austria’s IT infrastructure, public governmental services and industry innovation. The company cites research that says the investment in a new cloud region in Austria will help generate up to $2.1 billion in new revenue in its ecosystem over the next four years.
8)
Acapela from Berlin has landed €2.5 million to re-imagine online gatherings with what it calls an “asynchronous meeting platform.” “Instead of sitting through hours of video calls on a daily basis, users can connect their calendars and select meetings they would like to discuss asynchronously,” Acapela's co-founder Roland Grenke told TechCrunch.
9)
“China expresses strong dissatisfaction with Sweden,” said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, speaking at a regular news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. Reuters reports that the China's foreign ministry “should reverse its ban on Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE from a planned 5G spectrum auction to avoid a ‘negative impact’ on its own companies.”
10)
The European Parliament has backed a series of reports which could have a profound impact on the future of the platform economy, supporting a possible ban on targeted advertising, reporting procedures for illegal content, and better detection of fraudulent vendors.
Podcast:
tech.eu Podcast #192: Let’s talk about SPACs, Nokia on the Moon, China threatens Sweden, and we talk to Jambu Palaniappan of OMERS Ventures
Bonus link:
This one has little to do with tech, but will certainly resonate with anyone who has to read European Commission reports: “Misused English words and expressions in EU publications”
Would you like to write the first comment?
Login to post comments