Happy Friday!
This week, our research team tracked 110 tech funding deals worth over €1.9 billion, and more than 20 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) Swedish electric-car maker Polestar said on Monday it will go public by merging with a US-listed blank-check firm backed by billionaire Alec Gores and investment bank Guggenheim Partners at an enterprise value of $20 billion.
2) European e-commerce giant Coolblue has announced its intention to float and prepares to go public later this month in Amsterdam, seeking a valuation of around $4 billion.
3) Sinch, the Swedish company that competes with Twilio and others in the world of messaging and other communication APIs is making another big M&A play to build out its platform. It has signed a definitive deal to acquire Pathwire, the cloud-based email provider behind Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid. Sinch said it would pay $925 million in cash, with an additional 51 million new shares in Sinch.
4) After 12 years of blocking unwanted calls and texts for tens of millions of people, Truecaller is finally going public. The Swedish mobile phone directory, caller id and spam blocking service provider just published its IPO prospectus, giving its shares a price range between 44 and 56 Swedish crowns, which would give a market valuation between $1.9 billion to $2.4 billion after completion.
5) Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners is to acquire automation software developer Blue Prism Group for about $1.5 billion, in yet another takeover of a UK tech company by a foreign buyer.
6) London’s apprenticeship finder Multiverse has found $130 million of its own in a Series C funding round.
7) GP Bullhound, the London-based investment firm that financed some of Europe’s most prominent startups, has closed a fifth fund with €300 million euros to back tech companies.
8) AlphaSense, a Helsinki and SF-based company providing software services for the financial industry, announced the completion of a $180 million series C funding round. The money was raised from investors led by Goldman Sachs and Viking Global.
9) UK-born ticketing, livestream and music discovery platform DICE has raised up to $122 million in Series C funding. The round was led by new investor, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with follow on investments from Tony Fadell’s Future Shape, Blisce, French entrepreneur Xavier Niel, Mirabaud, Cassius and Evolution.
10) UK power supplier Octopus Energy Group agreed a deal with Generation Investment Management for $600 million in additional investment, taking the group's valuation to up to $4.6 billion.
Podcast:
🎧 -- Making sense of wine makes for a good business — with Heini Zachariassen, Vivino
Bonus links:
- The European Union and the United States have set the stage for a new era of closer cooperation to determine the rules of trade and technology of the 21st century while simultaneously boost their domestic industries and achieve greater self-reliance.
- A $5 billion EU antitrust fine was based on flawed calculations, Google said on Thursday, urging Europe's second-highest court to scrap or reduce what it said was not an appropriate penalty.
- So many big deals in the works: a funding round valuing N26 at $10 billion, a Glovo IPO, a $5 billion valuation for Belgium's Collibra, a listing for SoftBank-backed warehouse robotics group AutoStore that could value the business at almost $12 billion and so on.
- Five weeks before Web Summit, this is the inside story of how two founders went from couch to court over VC play.
- How Istanbul became the Silicon Valley of the mobile gaming industry.
-Restrictions on the way Apple’s iPhone and iPad interact with "wearable" devices such as smart watches, fitness bands and wireless headphones have triggered questions from EU enforcers investigating potentially anticompetitive conduct.
- Billionaires bet on Brussels to save them from AI singularity.
- ABB has launched the world's fastest electric car charger, the Swiss engineering company said on Thursday, to plug into the booming demand for electric cars made by Tesla, Hyundai and other automakers.
- The negotiations on ten industrial partnerships under Horizon Europe are complete, clearing the way for a December launch of the initiative.
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