The Week in European Tech: VC Draper Esprit raises £110M in 3 days, Northvolt scores $600M, And More

By Robin Wauters, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Tech.eu, with previous stints at The Next Web and TechCrunch under his belt.

Last week, our research team tracked 69 funding deals worth about 1.4 billion euros ($1.64 billion) in funding, and around 15 M&A announcements and rumors across Europe, including Russia, Israel and Turkey. As always, we put 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 we give you an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items last week (subscribe to our free newsletter to get this roundup in your inbox every Monday morning):

— Swedish lithium-ion battery-maker Northvolt is raising $600 million in fresh equity funds in a private placement joined by investors such as Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division, Volkswagen, Baillie Gifford, Norrsken VC and Scania, as well as private backers such as Spotify founder Daniel Ek and Cristina Stenbeck.

— Cazoo, the used-car sales platform, reached “unicorn” status after raising a little over $31 million at a $1 billion-plus valuation just three months ago. Last week, the U.K.-based company revealed it has raised a further £240 million (265 million euros) of funding at more than double the last valuation. The latest round takes the total funding since Cazoo was founded to a whopping £450 million.

— Uber is considering a purchase of Daimler and BMW’s ride-hailing joint venture, Free Now, a deal that could boost its market share in Europe and Latin America, people with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg.

— Sendinblue, the Paris-based digital marketing platform, raised $160 million in new funding. The company called its Series B round the “highest fundraising round for any all-in-one marketing platform in the U.S. and Europe” in a news release. Investors included Bridgepoint, Bpifrance and Blackrock, with Partech reinvesting from a previous $36 million in Series A in 2017.

— Vienna, Austria-based Bitpanda, which provides a brokering/exchange platform for trading digital assets such as cryptocurrencies and precious metals, raised a Series A round of $52 million. The monster round, which is claimed to be the largest Series A this year so far, was led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures and joined by Speedinvest and other investors.

— Publicly-listed European VC firm Draper Esprit raised gross proceeds of £110 million in a private placement to “fund an accelerated investment strategy and capture a greater share of technology investment opportunities.”

— French warehouse robotics outfit Exotec has raised $90 million in a new round of funding led by 83North alongside existing backers Iris Capital and Breega.

— Uber won its legal fight to continue operating in London, as a judge overturned a ban on the ride-hailing app by the city’s transport regulator and granted it a new 18-month license.

— French fintech startup October (formerly Lendix) has raised some fresh capital in a non-equity funding round to invest in small and medium companies on its lending platform. Overall, the company has gathered $300 million from various partners that will be deployed over the next few years.

— Swiss biotech firm SOPHiA GENETICS, which provides genomic and radiomic analysis for hospitals, raised $110 million in an oversubscribed Series F round led by aMoon, a health-tech and life sciences venture fund based in Israel, and Hitachi Ventures.

Podcast: Tech.eu Podcast #188: Daniel Ek pledges €1 billion for European moonshots, Transferwise on the rise, and we talk to Frédéric Mazzella of BlaBlaCar and France Digitale.

Bonus link:

Insurtech Rising: A pan-European overview of the hottest startups beyond the usual suspects.