This Week in European Tech: Gorillas' $1 billion round, Playtech's €3.2 billion acquisition, N26's $900 million Series E round, and more

This Week in European Tech: Gorillas' $1 billion round, Playtech's €3.2 billion acquisition, N26's $900 million Series E round, and more

Happy Friday!

This week, the Tech.eu research team tracked more than 100 tech funding deals worth over €3.3 billion, and almost 20 exits, M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe, including Russia, and Turkey.

As always, we are putting all of them together for you in a handy list sent in our round-up newsletter (note: the full list is for paying customers only).

Here's an overview of the biggest European tech news items for the past week (subscribe to our free newsletter to get this round-up in your inbox every Monday morning).

This week:

1) German food delivery firm Delivery Hero has invested $235 million in Gorillas, an online grocery startup, as part of a $1 billion funding round.

2) Fintech startup N26 has raised a $900 million Series E round at a $9 billion valuation. That represents a big jump from the company’s Series D valuation of $3.5 billion. The Berlin-based startup operates a digital bank with 7 million clients across 25 countries.

3) British/Estonian unicorn Playtech, one of the leading online gaming software suppliers in the world, will be sold to Australian company Aristocrat Leisure for €3.2 billion.

4) Zopa — a neobank with some 500,000 users in the UK where it provides peer-to-peer lending, savings accounts, credit cards and other services — has raised $300 million at a $1 billion post-money valuation.

5) Paris-founded 360Learning has raised $200 million in a private equity round led by Sumeru, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and Silver Lake Waterman. The collaborative corporate Edtech SaaS platform plans to use the sizeable investment to expand the team to over 500, with key hires targeting the innovation, engineering, and product departments

6) Enpal — a solar startup out of Berlin, Germany that uses AI for provisioning and installing services, and then a subscription-style model for homeowners to pay for it — has raised €150 million from SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

7) Aiven, a cloud-based open-source software services firm, raised $60 million in a second funding round in less than a year, as investors bet on growing demand from chief information officers for ready access to shared computer code. The new injection of capital, which comes just seven months after a Series C round netted $100 million, lifts the Finnish startup’s valuation above $2 billion.

8) Rossum, a platform used by enterprises to automatically process and “understand” all their inbound documents, has raised $100 million in a series A round of funding. Venturebeat sources say that Prague-based Rossum is now valued at somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion.

9) Sofinnova Partners, a longtime standard in venture capital, has announced the close of its 10th fund, aptly titled Sofinnova Capital X. The oversubscribed round currently stands at €472 million, bringing the total raise across its multi-fund platform to over €1 billion, with a total assets under management number hovering at €2.5 billion.

10) Social media giant Facebook has been fined £50.5 million for breaching an order imposed by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) during its ongoing investigation into Facebook’s purchase of Giphy.

Podcast:

🎧 Wireless freedom for schools and meeting rooms — with Jonas Gyalokay, Airtame

Bonus links:

- VC investment in Europe totalled €24 billion in Q3 2021, the second-highest quarterly figure in history. What's more, the three largest quarters for European VC deal value have been the three completed quarters of 2021, as the continent’s venture ecosystem rewrites its record books.

- Elon Musk flew to Berlin to woo the locals. He failed.

- Softline, an IT services and cybersecurity provider founded by Russian businessman Igor Borovikov, set a price range for its initial public offering in London and Moscow that values the company at as much as $1.93 billion.

- Bill Gates bets £200 million on UK’s underinvested green tech

- Facebook has reached a multi-year agreement to pay French publishers for resharing their content on its platforms.

- 15 years of BlaBlaCar with CEO Nicolas Brusson, is an IPO imminent?

- EU’s ambitious new tech rules to be delayed further into 2022

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