This week, our research team tracked 115+ funding rounds totalling €3.2 billion, as well as close to 20 mergers, acquisitions, IPOs and SPACs 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).
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).
What happened this week in European Tech?
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>> Notable and big funding rounds
London-based payments firm SumUp has raised €590 million in its latest funding round, giving it an overall enterprise value of €8 billion. The round, which involved a combination of equity and debt, brings the total amount of capital raised to €1.5 billion.
British online grocer Ocado has raised £578 million from investors on the public markets to fund the development of its technology division, which licenses its automated warehouse technology to other brands.
London-based digital home finance fintech StrideUp has completed a funding deal for up to £280 million to offer a new mortgage plan for first-time buyers in the UK.StrideUp offers new mortgage plan.
San Fransisco-based venture fund Greenoaks Capital has led a new $200 million round for Germany-based HR startup Personio valuing the company at $8.5 billion.
Parisian enterprise-grade platform for building, running, and scaling web applications Platform.sh has raised $140 million in a Series D funding round.
Berlin-based ground transportation platform Omio has sealed a funding round of $80 million from some of the world’s leading tech and growth investors.
British AI-based personal finance chatbot Cleo has hit a $500 million valuation thanks to a an $80 million funding round, according to Sky News.
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>> Noteworthy acquisitions, mergers, IPOs and SPAC deals
Shares of Sweden's Polestar made their public-market debut under the ticker “PSNY” on Friday, making it the latest electric vehicle maker to go public via a merger with a SPAC. Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said the company will use the roughly $850 million raised from the deal to fund its three-year plan to build new vehicles and eventually become profitable.
Entain has agreed a deal to acquire Dutch online sports betting and gaming operator BetEnt, trading as BetCity, from Sports Entertainment Media. Under the agreement, Entain will pay an initial €300 million in cash at completion, with the deal also including deferred contingent consideration of up to €550 million.
UK-based genomics laboratory automation startup, SPT Labtech has been acquired by EQT from Battery Ventures for £650 million.
Echobot and Leadfeeder, European sales intelligence specialists, have merged and raised €180 million from Great Hill Partners.
Italian sports-oriented streaming tech provider Deltatre has announced a deal to be sold to Bain Capital and Nextalia SGR. According to SportsPro, the value of the deal is between $700-900 million.
Norway-born SaaS company Visma, which offers a suite of accounting, payroll, HR, and other business software products to more than 1.2 million SME customers across the Nordic, Benelux and Baltic regions, has acquired Belgian software developer Teamleader from investors Fortino Capital, Keen Venture Partners, and PMV.
SoftBank-backed temp work platform Jobandtalent is set to acquire UK job matching AI startup Jump for an undisclosed fee. The Spanish startup, which was founded in 2009, offers temporary work opportunities to users in areas such as warehousing and logistics.
Backed by Credit Agricole CIB and Deloitte, enterprise-grade blockchain settlements and payments provider SETL has been acquired by Turkish embedded fintech services platform Colendi.
Berlin-based product-to-consumer (P2C) software company Productsup has acquired World of Content.
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>> Interesting moves from investors
Robin and Saul Klein’s VC vehicles LocalGlobe and Latitude are now under one parent organisation, dubbed Phoenix Court Group. In conjunction with the rebrand (of sorts), the Group has announced a $500 million fund aimed at backing founders from pre-seed right on through to an IPO and beyond.
Multinational bank HSBC has launched a £250 million fund to invest in “high growth, loss-making” tech scale-ups in the UK.
London’s got a(nother) new climate tech VC firm in town, Kiko Ventures (previously known as Transition Ventures), which comes armed with a hearty $450 (£375) million. The fund is aimed at supporting climate tech startups across the board, ranging from Seed and/or Series A/B, right on through to an IPO.
Parisian built-by-founders-for-founders VC firm Breega returns to the pitch with a fresh €250 million fund specifically aimed at supporting approximately 20 founders raising capital at Series A and above levels.
Proptech investor Concrete Ventures is looking to raise €100 million to invest in seed and Series A proptech startups in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Helsinki and Stockholm-based venture capital fund Butterfly Ventures has announced the first close of its €100 million seed entry capital fund at €47 million.
Prague-based Presto Ventures has announced the close of its second fund at a magnificent €30 million.
Rocket Internet fund Global Founders Capital is slimming down.
London-headquartered VC Octopus Ventures has rolled out its first pre-seed £10 million-fund to fill the growing gap in very early-stage funding for European founders.
Belgium-based Seeder Fund has unveiled its second investment fund with a target size of €30 million to back digital startups.
A look at Uipath's new investment arm.
Italian banking group Sella has launched an acceleration programme dedicated to startups focused on finance in the metaverse.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) and G+D Ventures, the venture capital arm of the global security group G+D, are creating a €50 million co-investment platform.
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>> In other (important) news
The boss of WorldRemit, one of Britain's most prominent fintechs, has quit, reflecting fading short-term prospects for it to float at a multibillion pound valuation.
The UK government has outlined its plan to bolster buy now, pay later (BNPL) regulation in a move that will force providers to conduct credit checks and register with the Financial Conduct Authority.
Google has quietly dropped its appeal in France against an antitrust fine of half a billion euros levied against it last summer for major breaches in how it negotiated to remunerate local news publishers for displaying copyrighted content.
Berlin-based Raisin, which ranks among the European fintech elite, has hired Goldman Sachs to help it secure a new injection of capital, Sky News has learned.
Revolut has announced it is entering into the buy now, pay later (BNPL) space with the rollout of what it calls a “responsible” pay later product.
In France (and beyond), a lot of of eyes are fixed on Deezer, which is making yet another run to go public (by way of SPAC). Or not. It has attempted it before, and always pulled back to adverse market conditions.
Intel is seeking €593 million in interest from the European Commission after a record 2009 antitrust fine was annulled earlier this year, according to a filing from the European General Court published Monday.
Another strike against use of Google Analytics in Europe: The Italian data protection authority has found a local web publisher’s use of the popular analytics tool to be non-compliant with EU data protection rules owing to user data being transferred to the U.S. — a country that lacks an equivalent legal framework to protect the info from being accessed by U.S. spooks.
Alphabet reopened Google News in Spain on Wednesday, eight years after it shut down the service because of a Spanish rule forcing the company and other news aggregators to pay publishers for using snippets of their news.
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>> Recommended reads and listens
The European Innovation Council’s Delays Are Putting Startups At Risk
A peek at VC payslips in Germany: positive for women, less so for climate fund employees
SumUp co-founder Marc-Alexander Christ on that €590 million funding round, its new valuation, and what comes next
How Serbia-based HTEC Group secured a $140 million investment from Brighton Park Capital
EU’s tech policy: a mid-term review
The upcoming Czech Presidency has shared a discussion paper with the other EU governments to gather their views on AI definition, high-risk systems, governance and national security.
Klarna and Barclays in row over buy now, pay later
Moldova: Europe’s hotspot for IT outsourcing
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