This Week in European Tech: A crazy few days for La French Tech, Gorillas and Flink raising mega-rounds, Google seeks to settle EU probe, and more

Happy Friday!

This week, our research team tracked more than more than 120 tech funding deals worth over €3.4 billion, and more than 15 exits, M&A transactions, and 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) Leveraging the power and value of NFTs, Parisian fantasy football platform Sorare has raised a mammoth $680 million in a Series B funding round giving it a valuation of $4.3 billion.

2) Paris-based Mirakl, an enterprise marketplace solution that empowers brands and retailers to launch and grow enterprise marketplaces at scale, announced that it has raised $555 million in a Series E round of funding.

3) Word on the grocery delivery street is that German food delivery company Delivery Hero plans to invest in grocery startup Gorillas as part of a $1 billion funding round (at a $3 billion valuation), while DoorDash is reportedly leading a fundraising round in Flink with a pre-money valuation for the other Berlin-based grocery delivery startup of $2.1 billion.

4) MarketFinance, the UK fintech business lender, has announced a debt and equity fundraising round totalling £280 million, which it will be using to lend to companies in need because of the pandemic’s effects. It has also now been accredited under the Recovery Loan Scheme.

5) Prodigy Finance – the UK fintech pioneer of cross-border lending for postgraduate international students – has secured a funding deal from CPP Investments which will see the institutional investor provide up to $500 million of financing through a subsidiary.

6) Blueground, the Greek proptech company that offers furnished apartment rentals, has raised €140 million in equity funding led by Laurence Tosi’s WestCap Group, an existing backer, as well as Geolo Capital, an investment arm of billionaire John Pritzker’s family office, the greek VentureFriends and Prime Ventures.

7) German solar installer Enpal has raised €345 million in debt financing to fund the deployment of more than 15,000 household solar PV systems.

8) Google is seeking to settle an EU antitrust investigation into its digital advertising business, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, a move that could help it stave off a disruptive, lengthy probe and a possible hefty fine.

9) The acquisition train just keeps on chugging along for Stockholm’s omnichannel communications platform Sinch, as they’ve just announced the definitive agreement to acquire Munich’s MessengerPeople for €48 million.

10) Parisian digital marketing platform Sendinblue has announced the acquisitions of chatbot tool (not the town) Chatra, analytics offer Metrilo, and shopify’s top notification pusher PushOwl, for a grand total of $47 million.

Podcast:

🎧  -- Investing in new mobility ecosystem in Europe — with Jennifer Dungs, EIT InnoEnergy

Bonus links:

- Apple and Google bow to Russia.

- The European Commission’s bid for technological sovereignty has a new target: semiconductors.

- Manufacturers will be forced to create a universal charging solution for phones and small electronic devices, under a new rule proposed by the European Commission - including Apple.

- Invest Europe, in partnership with the European Investment Fund (EIF), published ‘The VC Factor - Pandemic Edition’, a new report illustrating European venture capital’s continued strong support for innovative and fast-growing start-ups in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

- EU companies are falling behind counterparts in China and the US in the global race to move artificial intelligence out of the research labs and into real life deployments, due to lack of technical feasibility studies, poor data quality and lack of investment in scaling up. These are the headline findings of a new report by EIT Urban Mobility.

- Stripe is opening a fintech development office in London that will focus on open banking, embedded finance and bank partner integrations.

- Is there life after exit: How to get the most out of a sale for startups and investors.