Hello!
Here is what happened today in European tech:
Deals
- In a somewhat unexpected twist, online pension provider PensionBee has announced its intention to list on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The fintech company’s floatation on the stock market could see its valuation reach more than £300 million.
- Gorillas, a Berlin, Germany-based startup building a business based on proximity-based grocery deliveries, announced that it completed a $40 million capital investment round. The money was raised from investors including the US-based hedge fund manager Coatue in a deal that puts a $200 million valuation on the company, post money.
- London startup Harbr, which has built a secure platform to enable big data exchange, has raised $38.5 million in a Series A round of funding, just six months since emerging from stealth mode.
- Paris-based video communication startup Livestorm has raised $30 million in Series B funding.
- Zeotap, a Berlin-born startup building a customer identity platform around a company’s own (first-party) data, has raised a further $18.5 million. This is an extension of a Series C round for the firm coming from a single investor, SignalFire, bringing the total to $60.5 million for the round.
- KINEXON, a Munich-based IoT company that develops hardware and software, has signed a €15 million venture debt loan from the European Investment Bank (EIB).
- insightsoftware, a provider of enterprise software solutions, has entered into an agreement to acquire IDL Group, a Germany-based provider of financial performance management software.
- Ride Vision, an Israeli company that claims to have developed the world’s first collision-aversion technology (CAT) for motorcycles, has closed a $7 million Series A funding round led by OurCrowd. The company has also announced the global launch of its AI-driven, safety alert system, which will be available in Europe a few months.
- London-based Banking-as-a-Service provider Griffin has raised a £6.5 million round led by EQT Ventures. This investment follows the company’s previous £3 million seed round announced earlier this year.
- CreativeX, a UK startup formerly known as Picasso Labs, has raised a £2.5 million Series A round led by Beringea. The company will use the fresh funding to develop its AI-driven analytics platform, which helps team’s understand the performance of image and video content within marketing and advertising campaigns.
- Dutch SaaS startup Objective Platform has raised €2 million in a round led by Amsterdam-based B2B investor Newion.
- 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
- Google has been hit with a 196.7 million Turkish lira ($25.6 million) fine by the Turkish Competition Board as part of an investigation against the company.
- In a bid to create jobs and growth in Sweden, fourteen of the country’s leading companies have come together to build 1,000 new companies in the next couple of years, under the ‘Restart the Future‘ initiative founded by Antler.
- A unique device identifier that Apple assigns to each iPhone for third parties to track users for ad targeting — aka the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) — is itself now the target of two new complaints filed by European privacy campaign not-for-profit, noyb.
- Technology companies’ services could be banned from the European market if they do not heed EU regulation, Europe’s industry chief Thierry Breton told German weekly Welt am Sonntag, as the European Commission finalizes rules on internet companies.
- How to become a great cross-functional leader.
- With her double strike against Amazon this week, Margrethe Vestager is seeking to prove that the EU’s conventional competition tools can still work against Big Tech.
- In the absence of acquisitions, IPOs are swooping in to save the (Israeli) tech scene.
- Ocado (UK) shops its way to a robotics platform for groceries and beyond.
- In a move that echoes that of its fellow digital banks, Revolut Business will now accept payments online.
- Finland has selected IQM to build its first quantum computer - a 50-qubit machine - by 2024.
- Onfido, the UK-born identity verification and authentication provider, today announced the appointment of Mike Tuchen as CEO to lead the company as it further scales its offer.
- London-based digital bank Monzo has seen the departure of another top-level executive, with its chief risk officer stepping down after just one year.
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