Hello!
Here is what happened today in European tech:
Deals
- Gamedev company Take-Two has agreed to buy Codemasters, a British gaming company, for £726 million in cash and stock. “Codemasters is best known for the Colin McRae and official Formula 1 racing games, and has seen its shares soar more than 60% this year,” Bloomberg reports.
- Vilnius, Lithuania-based lender SME Finance has received €80 million in backing from the European Investment Bank to support small and medium-sized businesses across the Baltic region. The company recently announced that it would be opening a neobank for business clients, which it intends to have operational by mid-2021.
- Israeli cloud-based data backup and recovery provider CloudAlly has been acquired by the US-based email security provider Zix in a $30 million cash deal.
- Fnatic, a London-based esports brand, has raised $10 million to continue global expansion and support its esports teams in competition. Building on the momentum of this investment round, it also launched a crowd equity campaign with Crowdcube to raise another £1 million. Founded in 2004, the company has now raised nearly $35 million across its various funding rounds. Fnatic began with its own professional esports teams and has branched into branded gear, from gaming keyboards to team jerseys.
- London-based VC Seedcamp has announced the £78 million first and final close of its fifth fund, which will go to pre-seed and seed stage investments. Some capital will be reserved for follow-on rounds up to Series B. The firm has also published the slide deck it used to raise the fund.
- Amazon-based business aggregator Heroes has gone out of stealth with a $65 million funding round. Heroes acquires successful Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) businesses from a range of different sectors including pets, homeware, garden, sports, etc. Giving those entrepreneurs an exit, Heroes has an in-house team to optimise and scale the brands internationally.
- Berlin-based startup Finiata, which gives flexible credit lines to small businesses, has raised €7 million in a follow-on funding round from most existing investors. The European Investment Fund is also participating through the Corona Matching Facility.
- We also tracked a large number of (other) European tech funding rounds and M&A transactions, all of which we are putting in a handy list for you on Friday afternoon in our weekly roundup newsletter (note: the full list is for paying customers only). Also check out our European tech news section for ongoing coverage.
Worth Knowing
- Within a few days from now we may hear about Twitter getting slapped with its first GDPR fine for is “Protect your tweets” feature not having worked properly for several years.
- The European Commission has agreed on a €1.8 trillion recovery package to “rebuild a post-COVID-19 Europe, which will be greener, more digital, more resilient,” and so on. The package contains extra €4 billion for the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme — though it still doesn't cover the €13.5 billion cut to the programme's overall seven-year budget introduced in July.
- French TV streaming startup Molotov has launched a new ad-supported on-demand service called Mango. According to the company, this is now the only service in France that allows to watch streaming content legally and for free.
- London and San Francisco-based VC firm Index Ventures has added a new investment partner — Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, the current COO of GoCardless and former chief product officer of Skyscanner.
- Patreon has partnered with the Danish podcast hosting startup Acast to make it easier for creators to distribute private, subscribers-only episodes.
- After three months of struggling, employees of N26 in Berlin have successfully elected a works council. For more context on the story, listen to our podcast episode from August where we discuss what had happened at the company.
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