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The word “Firgun” (Hebrew: ??????/ pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is an informal modern Hebrew term and concept in Israeli culture (originally Yiddish), which describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other person. It’s the opposite of “schadenfreude”. Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for someone else’s accomplishments, good fortune, or well-being. More about Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
Greetings from the USA. This #FIRGUN edition will be shorter than normal due to travel.
It’s hard to believe that even after 10 months since October 7th, there are still 115 Israeli h*stages held in G**a. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME NOW. In Israel, the week’s news was mostly focused on the expectation from an impending attack by Iran and its proxies.
It was a very turbulent week for financial markets with tech stocks losing over a TRILLION in market cap. Tokyo’s stock market promptly wiped out its year-to-date gains, suffering its sharpest sell-off since “Black Monday” in October 1987.
Google lost a landmark antitrust case over its dominance in search which may change tech competition going forward, X began suing companies for not advertising on its platform, Bitcoin lost 20%, and OpenAI is working on a new foundational model, codename ‘Strawberry’ and had several senior executives depart this week, including co-founder and president, Greg Brockman.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” – Lolo Jones, Olympic hurdler and bobsledder
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Noam Ben-Zvi and team Placer.ai on your $75M series D and $1.5 billion valuation of your foot traffic analytics platform that crossed the $100M in ARR!
- Kudos Ayal Yogev and team Anjuna Security on your $25M series B extension to expand Seaglass, your universal confidential AI computing platform!
- Way to go Yaron Silberman and team BAIBYS™ Fertility your $4.5M Series A round for an autonomous system for selecting ideal sperm for fertility treatments!
- Congrats Assaf Rappaport and team Wiz on securing an undisclosed multi million dollar round from SoftBank to continue scaling your cloud security platform!
EXITS
- Congratulations Sariel Moshe and team xFind (Acquired) on the acquisition by SupportLogic for an undisclosed sum!
- Way to go Ori Entis and team Staircase AI on the acquisition by Gainsight for an undisclosed sum!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
- The Cloud 100 list of fastest growing Saas companies
- State of private markets in Q2 2024 by Carta
- How the Google antitrust case may change tech competition
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
What happened to the markets this week? (source)
State of the VC market in the US, Q2 2024
What comes after music streaming?
One of these women was AI generated. Can you tell which one? Answer below
That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading.
There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating!
#tech #Israel #venturecapital #innovation #startups #founders
Answer – the lady with the blue background is real. Here’s how to tell them apart
He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.
He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.
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