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Google gets mammoth £2.14bn fine, UK tech firms raise £45m, iPhone turns 10 and much more

Welcome to The Week in Tech, your roundup of the week’s top tech news. This time, we have over £44m in UK tech investments, the latest on Google’s £2.14bn fine, information about the Petya ransomware and much more.

UK investments

Diffblue gets $22m

Oxford University spin-out company Diffblue made headlines after it closed a $22m Series A led by Goldman Sachs Principal Strategy Investments.

The company, which applies artificial intelligence to software development, is the result of 10 years worth of academic research.

Oxford Sciences Innovations and the Oxford Technology and Innovations Fund also invested.

Yoyo Wallet’s £12m Series B

UK-based app Yoyo Wallet, which allows users to pay for goods and earn loyalty points, raised £12m in Series B funding this week.

The Metro Group, a US-based wholesale food and retail giant led the round, which also drew support from Woodford Investment Management and Touchstone.

Your.MD lands $10m

HealthTech firm Your.MD announced the closure of a $10m funding round led by Orkla Ventures this week.

Existing investor Smedvig Capital also participated alongside other undisclosed backers.

Based in London, Your.MD uses AI and chatbots to communicate with consumers and help them gain information about their symptoms.

Other investments

Other investments included Muso’s £2.5m Series A, smart home battery firm Moixa’s £2.5m raise, Hometree’s £1.9m Seed and the £1.25m Seed round closed by RegTech firm ClauseMatch.

Inbound investment into UK tech

Other highlights this week included the release of EY’s European Investment Monitor, UK TechReport, which shone the spotlight on how foreign direct investment into UK tech companies reached a ten year high last year.

Some 269 foreign investment deals were closed in 2016, but despite the seemingly positive news, the report found that the growth was marginal – up only 0.4% when compared to the year before.

Additionally, the data shows that the UK’s market share decreased slightly from 30% of all tech investments across Europe in 2015 to 27% last year.

Google’s mammoth £2.14bn fine

In international news, US tech giant Google suffered a record-breaking blow this week as the European Union announced it would issue a €2.42bn (£2.14bn) fine as a result of the firm allegedly failing to comply with EU antitrust regulations.

According to regulators, the tech firm denied real choice to consumers and deprived competitors from being able to publicise themselves by instead pushing and promoting its own online shopping service in searches.

Petya ransomware runs wild

Firms across the UK, Europe and the US suffered yet another ransomware attack this week. Known as ‘Petya’, and also commonly referred to as Petrwrap, the malicious software (the second in as many months, by the way!) comes after WannaCry caused havoc across the NHS last month.

Similarly to what happened then, Petya is blocking users’ computers, encrypting their files and demanding a $300 bitcoin ransom in exchange for unlocking the device.  At the time of press, no kill switch had been found.

The iPhone turns 10

In happier news, this week saw Apple’s flagship smartphone, the iPhone, turn ten.

First launched in 2007, the first generation device didn’t feature many of the elements which most of us swear by today: there was no app store (this appeared in 2008) and devices only had a single camera (selfies hadn’t quite taken off yet).

Download of the Week

Spending too much time working on your tech startup and struggling to find the time to cook?

If that’s the case, our ‘Download of the Week’ may be one for you. Handpick scrapes recipes from blogs and Instagram and lets users filter their browsing based on preferences such as ingredients. It’s available on iOS and Android.

And finally

And finally, there’s a high-tech duvet that promises to keep you and your partner cool at night. The Smartduvet Breeze operates what it calls a “dual-zone climate control”, which basically means you can keep different sides of the bed at different temperatures depending on yours and your partners preferences. Cool? Gimmicky? That’s up to you to decide.

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