These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

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Happy Friday!

This week, we tracked 58 tech funding deals worth more than €187 million, as well as 11 M&A transaction and 2 IPOs across Europe (including Turkey, Russia and Israel).

We listed every single deal in our weekly newsletter (note: the full newsletter is now available to paying subscribers only). Here’s an extra overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) Spotify made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange this week, opening at a price of $165.90 per share - giving the streaming service a market cap just under $30 billion, nearly four times the company’s valuation as of its last round of funding. And yes, the NYSE really did screw up by flying the Swiss rather than the Swedish flag on Wall Street on the morning of Spotify's debut.

2) Facebook is rolling out stronger privacy protections to users ahead of the introduction of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but Mark Zuckerberg will not promise all future changes will apply to the company’s American users.

3) A new EU regulation means you can now access Netflix, Amazon Prime and other services from any country in Europe. The European Commission’s ‘digital single market strategy’, which last year claimed victory over mobile roaming charges, has now lead to it passing the ‘portability regulation’, which will allow users around the EU to use region locked services more freely while travelling abroad.

4) Wake, a Norwegian-founded design platform, has been acquired by US digital design software firm InVision. No terms were disclosed.

5) Publicly-listed app management platform appScatter has announced plans to acquire German app intelligence platform Priori Data for £13.5 million. The deal is for 100% of the company and is split between £9.45 million in cash and £4.05 million in shares.

6) Denmark’s tax authorities are demanding nearly 1,200 former Uber drivers to pay an additional $1.9 million in taxes for 2014 and 2015, after finding tax avoidance among close to all the drivers controlled.

7) TextMaster, a translation software startup, has been acquired by French translation agency Technicis. TextMaster, which has raised more than $8 million in funding, was founded through the eFounders startup programme in Brussels and Paris; this marks the programme’s first major exit.

8) Germany-based business consultants platform Comatch has raised €8 million in Series B funding led by Acton Capital Partners with participation from Atlantic Labs and btov.

9) Uber said on Thursday it would suspend its licensed service in Greece after the approval of local legislation which imposes stricter regulation on the sector.

10) UK-based energy tech firm Origami Energy has raised £18.6m in Series B funding. The round was led by new investor Aggreko and additional funds came from existing investors Octopus Ventures, Cambridge Innovation Capital, and Fred Olsen related companies.

Bonus link: One of Estonia's first "e-residents" explains what it means to have digital citizenship (Quartz)

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