The original version of this newsletter was published on Linkedin.
In case you’re new here, 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” (which stands for being happy for someone else’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for members of our community’s accomplishments, good fortune and wins. More about Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
Yesterday marked 600 days since October 7th. There’s very little I can add here in addition to the fact that there’s 58 Israeli hostages left behind, about one third are considered alive and we must #BRINGTHEMHOME ??
Israeli startups raised $1.25 billion in May 2025. This past week in Israeli tech marked the closure of two international R&D centres in Israel, Sompo (a Japanese conglomerate which operated an innovation centre for the past 10 years) and eBay which announced that it will shut down its Israel office and is letting go 200 employees. Not good news, but at the same time, a new report on Israeli founders in stealth concluded that Israel is experiencing a new ‘baby boom’ in startups, with a 30% increase in new company creation. Perhaps the two things are related…
In the wider tech world, the browser wars are back… Opera unveils Opera Neon, an AI browser for the agentic web, Perplexity released Comet, The Browser Company said it will open source its Arc Browser… OpenAI updated ChatGPT Operator with new reasoning model, and Jony Ive is developing AI necklace with iPod Shuffle design Mistral AI released Agents API for building AI apps. Elon Musk stepped down from DOGE and will go back to focusing on Tesla and SpaceX, but meanwhile Neuralink, his brain implant company, raised $600M in Series E. GrokAI, X’s LLM, is partnering with Telegram Messenger for $300M a year… UAE offers free ChatGPT Plus to all residents. Grammarly raised $1B to Expand its AI Productivity Suite. DeepSeek says its R1 update can perform mathematics, programming, and general logic better than the previous version, and comes close to o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. Tencent has just open-sourced HunyuanPortrait, an AI framework that transforms static portraits into incredibly realistic animations with just one image and a video template.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”– Albert Einstein
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congrats Ron Gura and team Empathy on your $72M series C to help families navigate the bereavement process and to revolutionise life insurance origination.
- Well done Roy Danon and team Buildots on your $45M series D round to modernise global construction with AI!
- Kudos Pavel Gurvich and team Tenzai on your $32M seed round for a stealth mode AI cybersecurity startup!
- Way to go Gilad Uziely and team Sequence on your $7.5M series A to automate consumer and SMB finances with ‘programmable transactions’ !
- Mazel tov Nir Gazit and team Traceloop on securing a $6.1M seed round for your LLM observability platform!
- Kol hakavod Matias Sigal and team REplace on your $2.1M seed round to accelerate clean energy deployment with site selection platform!
EXITS
- Congratulations Matan Derman and team APEX on your acquisition by Tenable for $105M just two years after founding your AI cybersecurity startup!
- Way to go Adi Ikan and team VERITI, a Check Point Company on the acquisition of your rapid remediation and multi-vendor integration platform by Check Point Software for a reported $100M!
- Big congrats Oren Aharon, Lior Hakim and team Hour One on the acquisition of your AI avatar platform by Wix for an undisclosed sum. I am proud we could support you with Remagine Ventures as your first investors from day 1 in 2019, well before people talked about generative AI…
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- A nearly 30% surge in the number of stealth-mode startup founders has been revealed in a special report by Dealigence – New report by Dealigence and Google for Startups Israel
- Israel Acknowledges Use of Laser Weapons to Intercept Drones – a relatively cheap and scalable defence tech solution for a big threat
- How to live in order to make the world a better place. Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s Commencement Speech Must Be Heard.
GLOBAL
- State of Enterprise Software 2025 Report by Silicon Valley Bank
- https://ai-2027.com/ is a research backed piece on the impact AI will have in the next two years.
- Anthropic CEO warns AI could erase half of entry-level white-collar jobs.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The founders in stealth report has some interesting data on the potential startup boom in 2025 – Supported by Stealth founders population growing by 27.9% in the last 12-months (source).
The world’s most educated countries per capita… there’s a lot of work to do…
Enormous sums of money are going to AI-related startups. However, the biggest slice of investment is coming at late stage. Over the past year, nearly half of AI-related funding went to late-stage enterprises, according to Crunchbase . (source)
There’s a series A crunch, with only 15.5% of startups that raised a seed in Q1 2023 graduating to raise series A 2 years after. But who is getting funded at the series A stage in the US these days? interesting data by Carta
Forget about SEO, it’s time to worry about GEO (generative engine optimisation) – how your brand shows up in LLMs. New research by Andreessen Horowitz on How Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Rewrites the Rules of Search (source)
How far are we from a superhuman coder or superhuman researcher powered by AI? Should we slow down or accelerate the process of getting these in people’s hands? a prediction (source)
Over 40% (7) $1B+ private-to-private acquisitions have happened in the last year. OpenAI, Databricks, and Stripe have each spent over 15% of their total funding to date on acquisitions in the last two years.
What strategies is big tech adopting towards leveraging AI? from the interesting latest slide deck by Benedict Evans AI is eating the world – (source)
“We are not what we say, we are not what we think, and we are not even what we believe. In this life, we are what we do.” – watch this video by the mother of Hersh Goldberg Polin z”l
That’s all for this week. Thanks for tuning in.
There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating!
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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