This week, the Tech.eu research team tracked more than 110 tech funding deals worth over €1.7 billion, and over 15 exits, M&A transactions, and rumours, and related news stories across Europe.

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

Important: get your tickets to our upcoming Tech.eu Summit on 17 May in Brussels pronto. We've got a fabulous speaker line-up and the agenda and event guide are available online - so don't hesitate any longer and get your tickets now!

From the likes of European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel to world-record breaking pilot Zara Rutherford, Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, (Transfer)Wise co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann, there will be a ton of people you're gonna want to learn from and meet in person at our first edition of the Tech.eu Summit.

There are a million reasons you do not want to miss out on our first ever major tech conference, but here's a list of 10 big ones as we start counting down 10 days before we see so many of you in (hopefully sunny) Brussels.

Below, please find an overview of the biggest European tech news items for the past couple of days (subscribe to our free newsletter to get this round-up in your inbox every Monday morning). 

What happened this week in European Tech?

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>> Notable and big funding rounds

Paris-based HR digital transformation company HR Path has raised €225 million in funding to boost growth, both organically and externally, and expand its operations in the 19 countries it is currently operating in.

A little over a year after scoring $100 million, Finnish open source phenom Aiven has raised more than twice that amount - $210 million - at a pre-money valuation of $3 billion.

London-based payments infrastructure provider Paddle has secured $200 million in a Series D funding round led by KKR.

London-based cleantech firm Carbon Clean has received a $150 million funding boost, a record figure for a carbon capture company investment.The Series C round for the UK climate company was led by US oil giant Chevron.

Pyramid Analytics, an Amsterdam, The Netherlands-based decision intelligence platform provider, closed a Series E funding round of $120 million, bringing total venture capital raise to $211 million.

France-born Hugging Face has closed a new round of funding to build the GitHub of machine learning. It’s a $100 million Series C round with a big valuation. Following today’s funding round, Hugging Face is now worth $2 billion.

Betting big on the rise in demand for providers of logistics technologies, Vienna-based digital e-commerce fulfilment platform byrd has raised $56 million in funding to let e-commerce retailers deliver the next day to consumers anywhere in Europe.

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>> Noteworthy acquisitions, mergers, IPOs and SPAC deals

British software firm Ideagen has agreed to a £1 billion+ takeover by London-based private equity firm Hg Capital. Nottingham-based Ideagen provides companies with business and risk management software.

European micro-mobility startup Reby has been acquired by Canadian private equity player House of Lithium for $100 million.

Nexi, the Italian fintech that scooped up rivals Danish-based Nets and then Italy’s SIA to create a $12.5 billion European payments giant, has made another acquisition, this time to dig deeper into financial services for small and medium businesses in the region. It has fully acquired Orderbird, a startup out of Germany that provides point of sale products and related services for restaurants.

London-based fintech Yapily announces it has signed an agreement with SCHUFA to acquire finAPI, the leading provider of open banking solutions in Germany. The deal is set to make Yapily the “largest open banking payments platform in Europe”.

Checkout.com is to extend its merchant financial services portfolio with the acquisition of French digital identity verification (IDV) company, ubble.

Online furniture retailer from the UK, Made.com, has announced its acquisition of Trouva. This lifestyle marketplace sells products from over 700 independent boutiques and brands.

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>> Interesting moves from investors

After backing two of Europe’s fintech unicorns, London-based asset management and technology platform Fasanara Capital has unveiled a new $350 million VC fund.

To back European tech scale-ups, German-Dutch growth capital firm Endeit Capital has wrapped up its third fund with €303 million.

VC firm Educapital recently announced that it has reached the first close of its second fund. The team has already secured €100 million and now wants to reach €150 million to invest in edtech startups as well as companies working on the future of work.

Even though Kinnevik is Europe's largest publicly listed startup investor, it has only recently begun to take stakes in travel startups. What it looks for in companies tells a broader story of how investors generally view the sector.

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>> In other (important) news

EU industry chief Thierry Breton met Tesla boss Elon Musk in Texas on Monday and the two signalled agreement on EU digital media regulation ahead of Musk's purchase of Twitter.

Google has signed deals to pay more than 300 publishers in Germany, France and four other EU countries for their news and will roll out a tool to make it easier for others to sign up too.

EU countries and lawmakers agreed on Friday to tougher cybersecurity rules for large energy, transport and financial firms, digital providers and medical device makers amid concerns about cyber attacks by state actors and other malicious players.

The European Innovation Council’s (EIC) Accelerator funding for start-ups continues to be held up as the Commission’s directorates fight over how to manage the new equity fund.

The European Commission is to put forward a generalised scanning obligation for messaging services, according to a draft proposal obtained by EURACTIV. The text marks a victory for child advocates, but a setback for privacy activists.

BNPL giant Klarna is introducing a flexible working policy that lets employees pick between staying at home or going to the office.

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>> Recommended reads and listens

How a Ukrainian tech entrepreneur created a startup from a Russian prison.

Can smart contracts replace lawyers in Europe?

Europe doesn’t have a deeptech startup problem, it has a deeptech scaling problem. 

Worth a trillion – where next for UK tech in the coming decade?

Northzone’s PJ Pärson on why Klarna turned them down (twice)