This Week in European Tech: Picnic picks up €600 million, Lilium goes public in SPAC merger, Sportradar's IPO, and more

Happy Sunday!

This week, our research team tracked more than 100 tech funding deals worth more than €2.2 billion, and about 20 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe (including Russia and Turkey).

As always, we are putting all of them together for you in a handy list sent in our round-up newsletter (note: the full list is for paying customers only).

Here's an overview of the biggest European tech news items for the past week (subscribe to our free newsletter to get this round-up in your inbox every Monday morning).

This week:

1) Amsterdam-based online supermarket Picnic has raised €600 million in its Series D round of funding to accelerate its growth and become the ‘most sustainable grocery delivery service' in Europe. The fresh funding was led by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust.

2) Air taxi company Lilium began trading on the Nasdaq exchange this week under the ticker LILM. The German firm is just the latest electric aircraft startup to enter the public market, raising more than $580 million in a SPAC merger with Qell acquisition group.

3) Swiss technology company Sportradar made its debut on Nasdaq. The company raised $672 million in the IPO in total (including a private placement) and was valued at $7.4 billion.

4) Uber has lost another legal challenge in Europe over the employment status of drivers: The Court of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, has ruled that drivers for Uber are employed, rather than self-employed contractors.

5) Sendcloud, an Eindhoven, The Netherlands-based e-commerce shipping platform, closed a $177 million Series C financing round. The round was led by Softbank Vision Fund 2 with a strategic investment from L Catterton and participation from HPE Growth.

6) Munich-based Commercetools, a provider of e-commerce APIs that larger retailers can use to build customized payment, check-out, social commerce, marketplace and other services, has closed $140 million in funding in a Series C round that values the company at $1.9 billion.

7) European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered on Wednesday her annual State of the European Union address. Among many other things, she called for EU member states to "bundle" their resources and called for a European Cyber Defence Policy.Most of the world's chips are produced in Asia and von der Leyen called on Wednesday for a reversal of the trend. She also announced that the Commission will present a European Chips Act to counter the dominance of Asia when it comes to microchips.

8) London’s payments infrastructure provider Form3 has raised $160 million in a Series C funding round. The latest funding is expected to fuel expansion plans into new markets, with a specific focus on the US, where the company is already in advanced conversations with a number of banks.

9) Manchester, UK-based Matillion, an integration platform for cloud data warehouses, has raised $150 million in its Series E round of funding.

10) Less than half a year after bagging €450 million in Series F funding, on-demand delivery giant Glovo is continuing its acquisition spree, this time to bolster its ‘quick commerce’ or q-commerce division. The Spanish company has bought one small grocery delivery player in its home country, Lola Market, and one that operates in Portugal called Mercadão.

Podcast:

🎧  -- Who you gonna call — with Olivier Pailhes, Aircall

Bonus links:

- A new lawsuit threatens a decades-long collaboration that brought Skype, robot delivery startup Starship Technologies and encrypted enterprise messaging service Wire into the world.

- A new report accused Ireland’s data protection watchdog of pulling the breaks on the enforcement of the EU’s data protection regulation (GDPR) in Europe and called on the European Commission to intervene, warning that the GDPR was “silently falling”.

- Time To End French Seed Funding Subsidies?

- Podcast: Who supports customer support — with Kristen Durham, VP, Startups at Zendesk

- Both neobanks Monzo and Curve launched their respective ‘buy now, pay later’ products…on the same day...and they are both called Flex.