The 10 biggest European tech stories this week

This week, Tech.eu tracked 11 technology M&A transactions and 76 funding deals (totalling €400 million) in Europe and Israel.

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

1) Intercom, the Irish-founded customer communications platform, raised $50 million from Index Ventures. Also this week we published an interview with Intercom’s co-founder Des Traynor, where he talks about the company’s forthcoming tour of events as well as its future in Dublin and SF.

2) French hotels group Accor acquired online home rental site Onefinestay for €148 million. The UK startup had previously raised €73 million from the likes of Intel Capital, Quadrant Capital Advisors and Index Ventures.

3) Intel announced the third acquisition of a European startup this year: Italy-based and IoT security startup Yogitech, which had raised less than €3 million to date.

4) Rocket Internet could be in the process of raising a second triple-digit round for its megafund, according to German publication WiWo.

5) The Berlin-based venture builder also announced this week that it has secured €75 million from Orange for its Paris-based Africa Internet Group.

6) The $11.4 billion proposed merger between Orange and Bouygues collapsed, hitting the the share prices of the big French telcos hard.

7) Jon von Tetzchner, who co-founded and led Opera Software for many years, launched Vivaldi, a browser that’s not for the masses.

8) Mark Tluszcz, CEO of VC firm Mangrove Capital partners, says that “investors should ignore the hype about FinTech”.

9) Hyped or not, Berlin-based mobile-first bank Number26 said this week that it has signed up 60,000 new customers in Q1 2016, taking its total to 160,000.

10) Things are not looking well for Norwegian gaming studio Rovio: the company announced this week an operating loss of €13 million in 2015, down from a profit of €10 million the previous year.

Bonus link: BBVA, how a €750 billion bank is using Facebook and Apple’s tactics to stop startups eating its lunch

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