Index Ventures Partner Hannah Seal joins the show today to provide deeper insight into the whats and the whys behind the firms' recently launched $300 million Origin II seed-stage focused fund.

TRIGGER WARNING: There's quite a bit of bad and/or sad news in this episode. We've done our best to remember the words of Robert Hunter, "...nothin' left to do but smile, smile, smile."

Up this week:

🇧🇸 The Binance/FTX fiasco and what it means to crypto.

🇺🇸 Zuck slashes 13% of the Meta workforce

🇵🇱 Ramp ramps up with one of the largest funding rounds on record for a Polish company.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Meta presses forward with its metaverse aspirations and acquires Cambridge-based sound recognition developer Audio Analytic.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Made.com, once valued at close to £800 million is acquired by Next for £3.4 million.

🇳🇴 OSLO-based Enode brings home $15 million in a Series A round led by Creandum and saw the participation of Chris Sacca's Lowercarbon Capital.

🇫🇷 Sarbacane, a company Robin's never heard of, raised $110 million, acquires Marketing 1BY1, and rebrands to Positive Group. Keep your eyes on this firm, as we foresee more acquisitions in the future.

🇸🇪 EQT Ventures just keeps on rollin', this time with its third fund at €1.1 billion. Since launching in 2016, the venture capital arm has accrued €2.3 billion. Not. Too. Shabby.

Dry Power? Fire Powder?

🇫🇷 PhotoRoom. It's fast, it's good, and it's the final nail in the coffin for working photographers. And they raised $19 million in a Balderton-led Series A funding round.

Government news:

• 🇪🇺 Microsoft faces a new antitrust complaint over its cloud computing practices as trade group CISPE, whose members include Amazon, took its grievance to EU antitrust regulators on Wednesday.
• 🇪🇺 The European Commission published a new regulation to streamline rental platforms’ operations and data-sharing practices across the EU’s single market, targeting the likes of Booking.com, Airbnb, and Expedia.
• 🇪🇺 EU antitrust regulators are drawing up charges against Facebook parent Meta over its use of customer data and the tying of its classified advertisements service to its social network.
• 🇪🇺 The European Commission is to conduct an “in-depth investigation” into Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of gaming company Activision Blizzard.
• 🇩🇪 Germany has blocked another Chinese acquisition of a domestic semiconductor company, in a further sign of the government’s tougher approach to protecting its high-tech sector.

🇪🇸 And in good news .... The Spanish Parliament has given the green light to a new startups law that will bring tax benefits and other perks to entrepreneurs, remote workers, and digital nomads who want to live and work in Spain.

🇳🇱 And the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, aka DAFT.

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!

This past May London-based payments infrastructure provider Paddle secured $200 million in a Series D funding round led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., perhaps better known as KKR.

No less than 15 days later, the company announced the purchase of US-based subscription metrics and retention automation startup Profitwell in a deal reportedly worth north of $200 million.

With today’s funding environment for startups getting tougher and tougher, we’ve seen a noted uptick in the number of mergers and acquisitions taking place in Europe. And we expect to see more.

Joining me today to discuss some key items to keep in mind when considering and negotiating an acquisition deal, I’m joined today by a man who’s seen both sides of the table when it comes to an acquisition, closing the Profitwell deal, but also as a Senior Director at Siebel Systems, a popular CRM that was acquired by Oracle back in 2005, Paddle President and COO Jimmy Fitzgerald.

Well alright, alright, alright. Robin's back in the studio this week, and after nine years, he actually has a semi-professional setup. This week:

🇩🇪 The first German developer of quantum computers, eleQtron has raised over €50 million in new funds, including venture capital from Earlybird and Siegerlandfonds.

🇸🇪 Polestar obtained $1.6 billion in financing support from its two major shareholders

🇩🇪 Volkswagen sells its electric car-sharing service, WeShare to Miles Mobility. Here's why.

🇵🇹 Web Summit? That's 71,000 people too many.

🇸🇪 Sweden’s STILRIDE is anything but still, rides ahead with €3.7 million

🇩🇪 Billed as the first European ClimateTech Entrepreneur in Residence programme, Atlantic Labs and FoodLabs launch Founders for Climate initiative

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 / 🇩🇪 Not quite dead yet, but Made.com has indicated that they're headed towards administration, and German nappy service provider Windeln.de has filed an application for insolvency proceedings

🇩🇪 Now closing in on close to $1 billion raised, Volocopter lands another $182 million in second signing of Series E round

🇪🇺 According to the Tech.eu database, European tech companies raised €5.7 billion in total in October, recording a €1 billion decline compared to the total amount raised in September (€6.7 billion).

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!

As part of Tech.eu's Big Deal feature, this week, we're putting “data orchestration and workflow software for life sciences” Seqera Labs under the microscope and aim to dissect just where the company came from, what part it played in the fight against Covid-19, and what an Addition led €22 million investment round means for the company.

Moreover, instead of just the written word, we managed to sit down with Seqera Labs' CEO and co-founder Evan Flowden and hit the record button.

Read the article in-depth over at Tech.eu.

Well alright, alright, alright. Today is Robin's birthday and he's headed back to Brussels after co-hosting a start-studded event here in London. In the meantime "temporary" Tech.eu writer Fiona Alston sits in and shares her thoughts and opinions on the news items that caught her attention this week.

🇪🇺 First up, Bill Gates throws his support behind new European cleantech scale-up coalition

🇫🇷 Launch of a bioengineered houseplant called Neo P1 purifies your home

🇵🇹 No sheet: eToro acquires portfolio management provider Bullsheet

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Pixera is on a mission to make professional e-learning a more entertaining experience

🇪🇸 Former Tiger Global partner Lee Fixel’s Addition lead Seqera Labs’ €22 million investment round

🇮🇪 Johnson Hana raises €10.5 million to up-end the legal market

🇫🇷 One more thing: insuretech Neat

🖋️ One more one more thing: Dan was interviewed by Black Unicorn PR

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!

Well alright, alright, alright. This week Robin's quite literally underwater, taking a well-deserved few days off and, in his own words, "sipping cocktails poolside", so we've managed to rope in Molten Ventures' Marketing Director James Clark to get a VC fund marketers opinion on four stories that caught our eye this week.

🐄 First up, Hoxton Farms raised $22 million in its efforts to pack in the fat and up the taste of meat alternatives. Dan concludes that ultimately everything tastes like chicken, and James adds that it now also tastes like pork belly too.

✈️ While Quantum Systems raised $17.5 million, in part via Peter Thiel directly himself, J&D dissect not only what the company does, but where the heck the name came from and if a massive pivot and Schrödinger weren't involved.

🚀 As it turns out, James is a massive space nerd, and Dan can recall the nominal average value of standard gravity at Earth's surface (9.8 m/s2). The duo somehow manage to weave this into a discussion about Orbex's landing £40.4 million in a Series C funding round as it gears up for the first vertical launch from Scottish soil.

🏖️ And one more thing - after being hard hit by the pandemic, travel tech funding seems to be on the mend as Munich's Holidu housed north of €100 million in a Series E round led by 83North.

All this and a whole lot more on this week's episode of the Tech.eu Drive at Five!

Security and privacy frameworks are not your everyday topic of conversation, but the minute either of these fails, it's the talk of the office.

On the back of a just-days-ago-announced $40 million Series B extension to an already impressive $110 million round, we sit down with Vanta Chief Revenue Officer Stevie Case to discuss just what advantages the company offers organisations, and what this rock solid compliance certification can mean when it comes to speed of execution, growth, and ultimately the bottom line.

Stevie also highlights, in 90 words or less the top three most requested compliance certifications, SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and how Vanta works closely with auditors to ensure that every client that walks through their doors leaves fully compliant.

The company has recently opened offices in Dublin and Sydney, with Stevie confirming that the company is currently scouting locations to open operations in South America. When asked about any future M&A activities, Ms. Case remains ... politely silent. 

All this and more with Vanta Chief Revenue Officer Stevie Case.

In this 🇹🇷 Türkiye 🇹🇷 special edition both Dan and Robin are dusting off their boots from a trip out to Istanbul and the Webrazzi Summit, but never the less ....

We discuss the rumoured Getir/Gorillas merger.

Which of course evokes memories of one of the biggest shopping expeditions of all time: Ford vs. Ferrari.

Robin weighs in on the fast-delivery space and who's next on the M&A consolidation action.

Philly!

We discuss CNBC's Ryan Browne reporting on N26's, "net revenue increased 67% in 2021 to 120.3 million euros as the bank benefited from growth in subscriptions, stronger customer engagement and higher interest rates. However, the company continued to lose money that year, with its net loss climbing 14% to 172.4 million euros."

BaFin and Wirecard, with a tangent to kebab and The Gamestop Saga.

ABC = Always Be Cobbling.

Bonus: be the first to tweet us first with the addendum to the ABC's and you'll win a free t-shirt from Tech.eu.

And last by not least, Dan recaps the Big Deal this week and the rationale behind Grover's numbers. While he wanted something dark and dirty to be going on, in fact, the $2.1 billion in debt funding does, in fact, check out.

Teşekkürler!
 

Woof, what a week it was. Pony up to your favourite beverage of choice, and let's recap what caught our eyes here at Tech.eu

❗ Tech.eu is expanding! We're looking for some new crackerjack news tellers to join our editorial team. If you've got the chops, or know someone that does, hit us up at [email protected].

🎮 London-based Improbable did NOT, in fact, close a $100 million round this week, as confirmed by Tech.eu, but rather, they're in the process of closing the round. Robin reports on how very strange this news is.

❗ The Tech.eu Summit is 24 May 2023. In Brussels.

🛒 Spotify snaps up Kinzen / Reddit acqui-hired (Robin hates that term with a passion) Sweden's Oterlu.

🤖 Dublin-based Tines extended its Series B round by $55 million, and we find out just how Lee Fixel quit Tiger Global. Hint: Reuters.

🪑 An Austrian pr0n company proposes to buy Home24 for $250 million. In Robin's words, "F*ck you Home24". (XXXLutz is actually a furniture retailer that was founded in 1945).

🦷 Maki.vc sunk €5.3 million into Düsseldorf-based at-home orthodontics device maker K Line. Of interest as the IoT investment space has cooled dramatically.

📉 Tech.eu Insider members have exclusive access to our quarterly report where we outline the shape of the European landscape.

🥄 Dan recaps the Big Deal article that went out earlier this week, diving a bit deeper into Bending Spoons' recent $340 million funding round. We got revenue numbers direct from the horses mouth, uncovered that H14 is the family office of the Berlusconi family (Bunga bunga!), and how and why the company's name is tied to The Matrix.

📱 One more thing: The European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favour of enforcing USB-C as a common charging port across a wide range of consumer electronic devices. Hallelujah. F*ck you dongles.

🍻 That's it, now get out there and have a fantastic weekend.

❓ Leave it, I don't care.