Happy Friday!
This week, our research team tracked about 75 tech funding deals worth more than €600 million, and over 20 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) Britain will impose a new competition regime next year to prevent Google and Facebook using their dominance to push out smaller firms and disadvantage consumers. The code will be enforced by a dedicated unit within the Competition and Markets Authority, which this year said it needed new laws to keep the tech giants in check.
2) Norwegian learning platform company Kahoot has acquired Estonia’s language learning mobile game maker Drops for as much as $50 million. Kahoot is paying $31 million in cash, plus another $19 million if Drops performs well from 2020 to 2022.
3) German-born Atai Life Sciences has landed $125 million in funding from investors including Peter Thiel. “Atai is developing a range of drugs for mental health treatment, including ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin — the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms,” Sifted reports.
4) Salesforce Ventures, the investing arm of the marketing software tech giant, is putting money into AppsFlyer, the Israeli company best known for its mobile analytics tools. The new investment is a late entry to the Series D funding that AppsFlyer announced in January, raising the size of the round to more than $225 million, and upping the valuation to $2 billion.
5) Berlin-born HelloFresh announced its US subsidiaries have entered into an agreement to buy Factor 75 for up to $277 million. Of that amount, $177 million is payable upon the closing of the transaction, while up to $100 million is structured as performance-based earn-out. With the acquisition, HelloFresh will gain its first office in Chicago, along with four production and fulfillment facilities.
6) Shares in Russian online retail giant Ozon surged by more than 40% in the first minutes of trading after the most eagerly anticipated Russian IPO in years. Ozon is the country’s second-largest e-commerce player, and the first-day jump gave Ozon a valuation of more than $7 billion in what analysts saw as a wildly successful launch.
7) Just days after the triumphant NASDAQ IPO of Ozon, a leading Russian e-commerce company, another Russian digital major, video streaming platform ivi.ru, has started the registration procedure for a US IPO.
8) France confirmed that it will levy its tax on digital giants for 2020, following a warning by Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire in October that it would do so. With this decision, however, it risks US countermeasures.
9) The EU wants to take control of its own data, part of a broader effort to wrest digital influence from large companies in the US and China. The EU’s executive arm today proposed new legislation aimed at creating an EU-wide data marketplace to facilitate sharing of industrial and government information—provided the data is protected according to European standards, under the eyes of the bloc’s regulators.
10) London-based Round Hill Ventures (RHV) will invest in European proptech startups from a new fund, which just had its first close on the way to a target €200 million. The firm will invest anywhere from late seed to Series B.
Podcast(s):
tech.eu Podcast #197: Amazon businesses unpacked, Kahoot buys Drops, French taxman strikes, rising demand for EU lobbyists
tech.eu Podcast — Interview Special: great conversations with Adelina Peltea (Holded) and Bogdan Iordache (How to Web)
Bonus links:
- Transforming the mobility landscape through collaboration and innovation
- Europe needs a shift in mindset to position itself for the future. Frank Thelen’s new book 10xDNA offers insights on how to do that
- How to articulate a clear go-to-market strategy
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