Want to keep up to date about European startup news? Want to be in the know about controversies, deals, acquisitions, reports and other interesting tech tidbits from across the continent. Look no further!

Here is all the news about startups in Europe this week, brought to you by our pan-European team of Sifted journalists. If you want the news (and so much more) in your inbox three times a week, sign up to our newsletter here.

VC News

??Business bank Tide is on a hiring spree in Sofia. It’s not the only European startup to be growing a tech team in Bulgaria; fellow British fintech Receipt Bank has over 100 employees in the city, while interior design startup Clippings.com is also building out an office. Bigger organisations too, like Dutch delivery giant Takeaway.com, Scottish scaleup Skyscanner and retail tech firm Ocado have development teams in Sofia.

?Germany had its biggest funding round with transport startup FlixMobility raising €500m. It plans to use the money to expand beyond running long-distance coach services and trains into carpooling, where it will contend with another European mobility scaleup, France’s BlaBlaCar.

?London-based fintech Atom Bank has raised £50m. But is it struggling amongst the competition? Atom is now valued at £530m, and has raised more than £450m in total. Compare that to Monzo, which has a much higher valuation of more than £2bn, after raising around £325m. Or N26, which is valued at £2.8bn, after raising more than £540m in total.

?Sennder, a Berlin-based logistics startup, has raised $70m. Logistics is a $400bn market in Europe alone, and there are already plenty of promising players. Aside from Sennder, which has built a digital platform to help small and medium trucking companies optimise, track and manage their loads, there’s Fretlink in Paris and OnTruck in the UK, also in the road freight space. When it comes to shipping goods from one continent to another, there’s Berlin-based FreightHub.

?Chinese tech giant Tencent has invested in another European company: retro games streaming startup Antstream. This follows other investments this year into digital bank N26, AI startup Prowler.io, fintech toolkit TrueLayer and games studio Fatshark.

?️ Travelperk, the Barcelona-based corporate travel booking platform, has raised an extra $60m to boost expansion in Europe. It’s growing super fast but, argued founder Avi Meir in a recent piece for Sifted, not sacrificing its employees’ sanity to do so.

Trends

??Westward march of the fintechs: Revolut, N26 & Raisin train their cash piles on cracking the world’s largest economy. Monzo we know you’re heading that way too but haven’t had the chance to speak with you about it yet ?(can someone please forward this to Tom Blomfield).

In case you missed it / reasons to email me

??Pioneers, the popular Vienna based startup event is no more  — which events will you be going to instead?

?Oral-B are launching an AI powered toothbrush – proof that we’ve reached peak AI?

?Alongside smart nappies – human progress or first world solutions?

✉️Found any other tech-enabled bodily functions or come across any other slightly superfluous uses of technology ?

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