Today in European Tech: EU wants to ban use of AI for surveillance, Swiss medtech firm CeQur raises $115 million, and more

Today in European Tech: EU wants to ban use of AI for surveillance, Swiss medtech firm CeQur raises $115 million, and more

Hello!

Here's what happened today in European Tech.

Deals

- Swiss medical device company CeQur has raised $115 million in the largest round to date for a privately-held European medtech company.

- Pale Blue Dot, a young Malmö, Sweden-based investment firm focused on backing climate tech innovations, has closed their fund at €87 million after raising an initial €53 million last year.

- Berlin-based smarthome/IoT comparison and shopping platform tink has raised €40 million in a Series D round. The funding round was led by Cadence Growth Capital, Rocket Internet, and ProSieben’s SevenVentures.

- A new fund is emerging on the tiny Russian venture scene. With $50 million in capital, ‘The Games Fund’ is the brainchild of Maria Kochmola and Ilya Eremeev, two former executives from My Games Venture Capital (MGVC).

- Sunday is a new French startup has raised a $24 million seed round at a $140 million post-money valuation to build a fast restaurant checkout flow.

- Berlin-based collaboration platform Wire has closed a $21 million Series B round led by UVC Partners, with participation from existing investors Iconical, Morpheus Ventures, Elysium Venture Capital and One Way Ventures.

- Danish white-label fintech Cardlay has secured €8 million in financing from newly minted Global PayTech Ventures.

- Carbo Culture — a startup that has scaled an industrial process to create large-scale CO2 removal using woody waste from agriculture and forests — has raised $6.2 million in seed a financing round led by True Ventures and Cherry Ventures.

- 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 Reading/Knowing

- The European Commission wants to ban the use of artificial intelligence to track people and rank their behaviour, with fines up to 4% of a company’s turnover for violations as part of draft AI rules to be announced next week.

- Ireland’s data protection watchdog has opened an inquiry into Facebook over a potential breach of European privacy rules.

- Amnesty International, Privacy International and 28 other civil and human rights groups urged EU lawmakers to take a strong stand on privacy rights in proposed rules governing Facebook’s WhatsApp and Microsoft’s Skype.

- The chief executive of THG, the online beauty retailer, is to hand a £100 million stake in the company to a new charitable foundation - establishing him as one of Britain's biggest individual philanthropists.

- Labor activists challenging Uber over what they allege are ‘robo-firings’ of drivers in Europe have trumpeted winning a default judgement in the Netherlands — where the Court of Amsterdam ordered the ride-hailing giant to reinstate six drivers who the litigants claim were unfairly terminated “by algorithmic means.”

- The UK’s competition watchdog has provisionally cleared the proposed £31 billion merger of Virgin Media and Virgin Mobile with O2.

- Italy aims to spend almost 7 billion euros in European recovery funds on ultra-fast networks, up 60% from a previous goal.

- London-based insurtech unicorn Zego has partnered with Dija, a new 10-minute grocery delivery startup in the city.

- The Central Bank of Ireland is seeking industry views about how tightly it should police marketing by crowdfunding companies such as Linked Finance and FundIt.

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