Weekly business update: The Oscars, Qubit and more

With another work week coming to a close, the weekend is a good time to catch up with the fast-paced tech scene.

At Index we gather tech coverage into one platform for tech enthusiasts to keep up with the news and access that data. In this series, we fill you in every week on what’s been happening in Tech.

Overall

In the past week, Index logged 169 funding events from 26 different countries. The top five countries in terms of number of rounds can be seen below:

America

This week in North America there were 87 investments made at a total of $1.4 billion. The biggest round was collected by the Oscars of $400 million in private equity. Check out the breakdown in series below:

Europe

Europe saw 37 funding rounds for a total of $118 million. The biggest round this week was hauled in by Qubit, a $40 million Series C round. Below you can see the breakdown of rounds for the week.

Comparing Europe and America

North America will, for the foreseeable future, always be leading in sheer volume of rounds and the size of those rounds (and therefore averages). However, it’s interesting to look at how Europe’s investment landscape stacks up against North America’s.

This week, it’s interesting to note that Europe’s average late stage round was considerably higher than North America’s.

This week’s must-reads

Facebook rolled out their new reaction buttons [The Next Web]
Foxconn got really really close to officially buying sharp for $6.2B [TechCrunch]
France gets Google to pay its taxes [The Next Web]
Apple started working on making it even harder to crack the iPhone [The Next Web]
Which machines will take over our jobs by 2035? [The Guardian]

Tune in next week for another update on the state of tech. If you can’t wait that long, consider signing up to the Index.co newsletter to get the week’s hottest tech news straight in your inbox!