These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week

Happy Friday!

This week, our research team tracked more than 70 tech funding deals worth almost €1 billion, as well as over 20 M&A transactions, rumours, and related news stories across Europe, including Russia, Israel, and Turkey.

Meanwhile, here’s an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) France’s Acrelec, the global leader in customer experience technology for “quick service” restaurants and retailers, has announced plans for a $223 million investment by Glory Global Solutions.

2) Klarna, the Swedish ‘buy now, pay later’ fintech unicorn, has landed a $200 million investment from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia for its launch down under.

3) French startup ManoMano, an online marketplace for DIY, home improvement and gardening products, has raised €125 million in a Series E round led by Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore. General Atlantic, Eurazeo, Piton Capital, Bpifrance and Kismet Holdings also participated.

4) Bird has acquired the European scooter company Circ, along with getting a new investment of $75 million. That means Bird’s scooters will now be available in more than a dozen countries.

5) London-based Currencycloud, which has built a set of remittance APIs that let any financial business integrate money transfer services into its platform, has raised $80 million from Visa, the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, French bank BNP Paribas and others.

6) Chinese tech firm Huawei has been designated a “high-risk vendor” but will be given the opportunity to build non-core elements of Britain’s 5G network, the UK government announced on Tuesday.

7) Opera, a global browser provider with headquarters in Norway, has acquired the Estonian startup PocoSys, which has developed a banking-as-a-service software.

8) Frontify, the Swiss brand management platform, has raised a $22.3 million Series B funding round led by EQT Ventures with some help from existing investors, including Blossom Capital, Datartis Ventures and Thomas Dübendorfer, Tenderloin Ventures, and Myke Näf.

9) SimScale, the Munich-based SaaS startup, has raised €27 million in Series C funding to grow its cloud-based engineering simulation tool. The round was led by Insight Partners with participation from Earlybird and other existing investors.

10) Israeli data science platform for real time machine learning applications Iguazio announced that it has completed a $24 million financing round. The round was led by INCapital Ventures, with the participation of existing and new investors.

Podcast: Tech.eu Podcast #153: VC sustainability clause, micromobility forecast for 2020, latest news, and more

Bonus link: “Common rules needed to foster Europe’s start-ups” (Financial Times)