Tech & Digital

De Brauw advised EQT Infrastructure V ("EQT V") and Stonepeak on their acquisition of DELTA Fiber from EQT Infrastructure III. DELTA Fiber is a leading owner and operator of fiber-to-the-home telecom infrastructure in the Netherlands. EQT V and Stonepeak will each hold a 50 percent stake in DELTA Fiber and co-control the company, supported by a strong advisory board of industry professionals.

IPRO Tech, a Parker Gale Capital portfolio company, has agreed to acquire ZyLAB, a peer e-discovery company. The Amsterdam-based ZyLAB is known for its data science technology including its ZyLAB ONE e-discovery platform and its ZyLAB Legal Hold products. Featuring a strong in-house analytics team with data science professor and longtime ZyLAB employee Johannes (Jan) Scholtes, the company has also in recent years increasingly moved into the SaaS and cloud offerings space. Financial details of the transaction have not been made public. ZyLAB will continue as a standalone brand within the EU and will be available as part of Ipro's suite of products as “ZyLAB, an Ipro company" in the US.

Global conversational commerce platform CM.com – through one of its subsidiaries – completed the strategic acquisition of TraceDock. This data start-up, with operations in Europe, specialises in privacy-friendly, first-party data collection. TraceDock's solutions will be integrated into CM.com's Mobile Marketing Cloud, enabling CM.com's customers to gain more insights from first-party website data. The integration will further improve and optimise CM.com's customer experience and is expected to boost CM.com's international growth strategy. TraceDock's founders remain involved in the business to promote this growth strategy.

A bill was recently submitted to parliament establishing a national security screening regime where target undertakings active in the Netherlands in vital processes or sensitive technology, are being acquired. In 2020, the Dutch government indicated its intention for the screening mechanism to apply retroactively. Under the current bill, the regime would apply to qualifying investments made after 8 September 2020.

The European Commission's landmark proposal on regulating artificial intelligence (AI) is a watershed moment in the evolution of AI global standards. AI as a dynamic grouping of technologies - capable of streamlining operations, optimising resource allocation, predicting behaviour and personalising customer treatment - is increasingly being harnessed by modern businesses to achieve competitive advantages. Unsurprisingly, such advantages are also susceptible to creating competition concerns, ranging from digital cartels to self-preferencing by dominant platforms. However, as AI applications are autonomous and programmed for self-learning, competitive harm might be caused even without human intervention. This complicates how liability is determined. Notably, the Commission places the onus on the undertaking using the AI. Thus, businesses must not only be aware of AI's anti-competitive potential, but they should also strive to comply with newly proposed rules, especially where these relate to transparency and monitoring obligations.

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