🎙️ The Drive at Five with Dan Taylor and Robin Wauters - Episode 14

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!