This Week in European Tech: Allegro's stellar IPO, Kahoot raises $215M, EU pledges €10 billion for homegrown cloud computing, and other big deals/stories

This Week in European Tech: Allegro's stellar IPO, Kahoot raises $215M, EU pledges €10 billion for homegrown cloud computing, and other big deals/stories

Happy Friday!

This week, our research team tracked more than 70 tech funding deals worth about €1 billion, along with a handful of M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe, including Russia, Israel, and Turkey. As always, we are putting all of them together for you in a handy list sent in our Friday afternoon roundup newsletter (note: the full list is for paying customers only).

Recently, we also started publishing 'Today in European Tech', a daily roundup of deals and news stories that caught our attention. Keeping you updated on all things EU tech is our priority!

Today, instead of a daily roundup we give you an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for the past week (subscribe to our free newsletter to get this roundup in your inbox every Monday morning):

1)

Polish e-commerce group Allegro went public; its shares shot up more than 60% on their trading debut, giving the company a market value of close to $20 billion in Europe’s biggest IPO so far this year.

2)

Norwegian user-generated gamified e-learning startup Kahoot! — which has clocked 1.3 billion “participating players” since launching in 2013 — has picked up $215 million from SoftBank in a private placement.

3)

Luxembourg-based Brighteye Ventures, which claims to be Europe’s first and largest edtech VC, has announced the $54 million first close of its second fund, bringing assets under management to above $112 million.

4)

The European Union aims to spend up to €10 billion over the next seven years to help build up a homegrown cloud computing sector that could rival foreign corporations such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba. Twenty-five EU countries signed a joint declaration on Thursday pledging public money to power up the cloud sector and establishing the "European Alliance on Industrial Data and Cloud," a partnership geared toward facilitating such projects.

5)

Arrival, the UK tech company focused on commercial electric vehicles, has raised $118 million from funds managed by BlackRock.

6)

Israeli AI-based machine monitoring solution provider Augury announced it has completed a $55 million Series D financing round led by Qumra Capital, and with the participation of Insight Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures, Munich Re Venture Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Lerer Hippeau Ventures.

7)

US tech giants are facing the threat of an EU attempt to break them up after France and the Netherlands jointly issued a call for the bloc’s competition authorities to take pre-emptive measures as they prepare sweeping legislation to curb the companies’ market power.

8)

France will begin collecting tax on big digital companies this year after international talks failed to agree on a global levy, its finance minister said this week, risking a trade war.

9)

German business transformation software maker Celonis has acquired Czech online automation startup Integromat. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Celonis co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke said the deal was over $100 million.

10)

More than 1,000 of UK startups have filed for administration, liquidation or dissolution since lockdown began, according to new research released this week by Plexal and Beauhurst.

Podcast:

tech.eu Podcast #190: Mealworms, unicorns, crowdfunding, and state of Spanish tech with Jaime Novoa

Bonus link:

Call for a 'Buy European Tech Act'

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