Hello!
Here's what happened today in European Tech.
Deals
- Through an extension of a previous round, Dutch omnichannel communications platform MessageBird has now raised a whopping $1 billion. Continuing their shopping spree, MessageBird has entered a definitive agreement to purchase Colombia, Maryland-based predictive email platform SparkPost for $600 million.
- London-based bring-the-internet-to-everyone provider OneWeb has secured $550 million in financing from Parisian Eutelset, bringing the rounds’ total funding to $1.9 billion. Eutelsat is one of the world’s leading satellite operators, and with this funding of OneWeb, the company is obtaining an approximate 24% equity stake in the latter.
- Oxford-based Exscientia, a pharmaceutical company that uses artificial intelligence to discover new drugs, has raised a new round of funding worth as much as $525 million to expand its pipeline of drugs and technological capabilities. The investment was led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund 2, with participation from previous investors Novo Holdings and BlackRock.
- Endeit Capital has closed its third and largest fund to date at €250 million, with the pledge to support European scale-ups that develop products and services aimed at accelerating the digital transformation of the European society and economy.
- Paris-based edtech company OpenClassrooms has raised $80 million in their third round and saw participation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a project Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg established with his wife Priscilla Chan in 2015.
- Viva Wallet, a Greek startup building banking services aimed at small and medium merchants, has picked up financing of $80 million.
- Israeli digital construction management Locusview has announced the completion of a $64 million Series A financing round led by Israel Growth Partners (IGP) in participation with existing investors.
- A startup out of Toulouse, France, called EasyMile — which builds shuttles for transporting both people and goods — has closed a Series B of €55 million.
- Connecteam, the Tel Aviv-based all-in-one app for deskless employees has raised $37 million in a Series B round. Led by Insight Partners, OG Tech, and the leadership team at Wix, the raise is expected to be used towards continued growth, particularly in the R&D department.
- IRP Systems, an Israeli maker of innovative powertrains for electric vehicles, has raised a $31 million Series C funding round, bringing its total funding to $57 million.
- Helsinki-based startup Yousician has raised $29 million in Series B funding.
- 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 Reading/Knowing
- The European Parliament gave its final stamp of approval to the Horizon Europe legislation today, but MEPs are already casting for ways to increase the €95.5 billion budget, with many still bitter over the failure to secure €120 billion for the seven year research and innovation programme.
- PitchBook has released a new summary of Q1 2021 European VC numbers, and the results are eye-opening and jaw-dropping. In the first quarter of 2021 alone, VC deal value is higher than years 2011, 2012, and 2013, respectively, clocking in at €17.6 billion.
- In the final (€2.96 billion) step required to get the new-look European Institute of Innovation and Technology off the ground, the European Parliament has voted through its new regulation and strategic agenda.
- Amsterdam’s challenger bank bunq has announced that they’ve reached €1 billion in user deposits. This milestone outlines a steep hockey stick curve, with the amount of money deposited by users more than doubling for the second year in a row.
- Russia’s antitrust authority has fined Apple $12 million over a case first brought against the Silicon Valley giant by Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky.
- Intel, the largest private employer in Israel, announced that it plans on recruiting an additional 1,000 new employees in 2021 for its various R&D centers, while hiring another 400 employees for its artificial intelligence operations at Habana Labs, which it acquired in 2019 and is still being run independently.
- Turkey is planning to regulate its cryptocurrency market after two local exchanges crumbled within days.
- The European Investment Fund and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology said they would collaborate on a project to improve access to digital education.
Today's Top Tweets
The Kroenke family has said it's not selling Arsenal. However, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says on @SquawkStreet he's "very serious" and has "secured the funds" to make an offer.
"I'm prepared that this could be a long journey," Ek says.
— Kevin Stankiewicz (@kevin_stank) April 28, 2021
The news is out! We’ve just announced our intention to acquire @SparkPost, the world’s leading email sending and deliverability platform. We couldn’t be more excited to build the future of communication together!
Read all about the acquisition here: https://t.co/zifFRqNhuQ
— MessageBird (@messagebird) April 28, 2021
I wouldn’t describe it as a branch of the UK government. Call it what it is. It is corporate welfare. Many of us are simply welfare recipients. https://t.co/x8mDeAZlht
— hussein kanji (@hkanji) April 28, 2021
On April 21, we hosted our second #ScaleUpEurope virtual workshop moderated by @tallecChristoph and Ashok Kaul: "Becoming the World's Deeptech Powerhouse" on #science, breakthrough #technology and the #VC model - here are some key ideas from the 🇪🇺 community pic.twitter.com/webEDsTAG3
— #ScaleUpEurope (@ScaleUpEuropeEN) April 28, 2021
Impressed by the calibre of some of Europe's newly launched VC firms.
Here are a few I admire:
🇫🇷 @newwavevc Focus: Agnostic
🇸🇪 @palebluedotvc Focus: Climate
🇦🇹 @calmstormvc Focus: Health
🇩🇪 @ReventVC Focus: Impact
🇨🇭@tomahawk_vc Focus: Fintech & DeFi
Who did I miss?
— Beata 👾 (@axeliaklein) April 28, 2021
Such a remarkable entrepreneur (Ali Niknam) and (challenger bank) business far too few people in Europe know about.
Financing a company yourself and simply not picking up the phone when investors inevitably call you all the time, and get to this:https://t.co/DOXgtGVWwe https://t.co/t6gM9gtJYA
— Robin Wauters @ tech.eu (@robinwauters) April 28, 2021
Today we published our financial results for Q1 2021. Take a look at our highlights: 🔴Orders are up 88% YoY to 663 million 🔴GMV is up 83% YoY at EUR 7.8 billion 🔴Revenue is up 116% YoY at EUR 1.4 billion Read more: https://t.co/yT9aiXr5Eq#deliveryheroresults #likeheroes pic.twitter.com/941TcbnI0Z
— Delivery Hero (@deliveryherocom) April 28, 2021
Spoke with Delivery Hero CEO Niklas Östberg on foot of today's earnings.https://t.co/hs9b9HwIpD
— Jonathan Keane (@J_K9) April 28, 2021
📣 Check out a special podcast episode brought to you by TAITRA:
What can European startups expect from this year’s Computex?https://t.co/hKitNWX8Iw
— tech.eu (@tech_eu) April 28, 2021
#EUSpace is ready to take off!
We welcome the adoption of the new EU space programme.
With the largest budget ever, it will modernise EU space flagship programmes, ensure EU autonomous access to space and support industry.
🛰️ https://t.co/yXEpKayNSI pic.twitter.com/BzupziDmVB
— European Commission 🇪🇺 (@EU_Commission) April 28, 2021
This was a very fun convo with Nicolas on my journey back to Chinese tech, differences in ecosystem and what European founders can learn from Chinese founders. https://t.co/Y8docE3aWW
— Lillian Li (@lillianmli) April 28, 2021
This rule of unanimous voting in Europe has been the most important bottleneck of any serious progress for the zone these last 30 years. It has to change. https://t.co/rAexyu4vKq
— Philippe MÉDA 🇪🇺 (@icopilots) April 28, 2021
In a joint declaration adopted by G7 Digital Ministers today, members recognized that "there is increasing international concern that participants with significant market power can abuse that power to hold back digital markets and the wider economy." https://t.co/2K2CECKYzq
— Samuel Stolton (@SamuelStolton) April 28, 2021
Thank you @tech_eu for the insightful and balanced write-up 🙌🏼 https://t.co/esjFzHrHrp
— So Syncd (@SoSyncd) April 28, 2021
Just released — Spotify Q1 2021 earnings and shareholder letter: https://t.co/gvE55SCNdE
— Spotify News (@SpotifyNews) April 28, 2021
📢 Portuguese DPA ordered National Statistics Institute to stop all data transfers to @Cloudflare in the US in line with #SchremsII
English Summary on @GDPRhub (https://t.co/Mf72NIu6W2)
Original at https://t.co/eYWOnzhTXT#GDPR #PrivacyShield #TeamDatenschutz pic.twitter.com/GnvZXXt0Un
— Max Schrems 🇪🇺 (@maxschrems) April 28, 2021
🤖% of EU businesses using #AI 🤖
🇮🇪 23 🇲🇹 19 🇫🇮 12 🇩🇰 11 🇪🇸 9 🇱🇹 9 🇵🇹 9 🇸🇪 9 🇮🇹 8 🇪🇺 7 🇧🇪 7 🇩🇪 7 🇬🇷 7 🇸🇰 7 🇨🇿 6 🇪🇪 6 🇫🇷 6 🇭🇷 6 🇱🇺 6 🇳🇱 6 🇷🇴 6 🇧🇬 5 🇦🇹 5 🇵🇱 4 🇨🇾 3 🇭🇺3 🇸🇮 3 🇱🇻 2
More via @eu_eurostat 👉 https://t.co/l9bU1m2VJg
— Digital EU 🇪🇺 (@DigitalEU) April 28, 2021
🚀 From garage to live deployments across Europe in under a year!
It's amazing to see Victor Dewulf and Peter Hedley's story growing @recycleye featured on @UKTNofficial
A must-read for any young founder with a big vision looking to get started 💭https://t.co/UI4TocDcJz
— Playfair Capital (@playfaircapital) April 28, 2021
We've been studying EU food delivery for the last month and thought we'd share some comments on the importance of the delivery fee and price elasticity of demand...$TKWY $UBER $DASH $ROO
— In Practise (@_inpractise) April 25, 2021
The French government presented today its latest anti-terror law. Intelligence services will be able to deploy algorithms to detect terrorist activity using not only telephone metadata — as is the case today — but also online information such as URLs. https://t.co/PmzHdy5rHk
— Laura Kayali (@LauKaya) April 28, 2021
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