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In case you’re new here, the word “Firgun” (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
We woke up to a new reality this morning. After negotiations with Iran hit a roadblock, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack to neutralise Iran’s nuclear weapon development. A response is sure to come, with schools cancelled and air space in Israel close. The ‘selfie flotilla’ was also stopped this week, with Greta Thunberg and others deported. She claims she was kidnapped, but there are actual Israeli hostages held in G**a for over 2 years. Their time is running out. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME ??
You’d think it’s hard enough to run a tech startup while dealing with tariffs, a challenging venture capital market, incumbents leaning in hard on AI and the day to day of running a business. But when you, on top of all of that, add the challenges of your country being at war, facing ballistic missile attacks and what not, it gives ‘challenging’ a new meaning. Nevertheless, this week Cyera raised over half a billion dollars and VAST Data is raising funding at a $25 billion valuation. A reminder that Israeli tech delivers #NOMATTERWHAT.
At the time of writing this newsletter large parts of the Internet are down to a mysterious malfunction including Google, AWS and Spotify as reported by users to Downdector. Meta paid $15 billion to acquire 49% of Scale AI and founder Alexandr Wang will be heading up a lab to pursue superintelligence for Meta… Apple relaunched its AI ambitions at WWDC 2025, but so far underwhelmed. The company aims to use AI to fully automate ad creation by 2026. Nearly half of the startups in Y Combinator‘s new cohort (67 out of 144) specialise in AI agents. Salesforce is blocking AI rivals from storing or searching Slack messages – perhaps we will see more of this ‘protectionism’. Tesla delayed robotaxis launch in Austin Texas. Mistral AI released a vibe coding agent and a pair of reasoning models. The Walt Disney Company and Comcast teamed up to sue the artificial-intelligence startup Midjourney, accusing it of copyright infringement. OpenAI hits $10 billion in annualised revenue fuelled by ChatGPT growth. Tencent just launched HunyuanVideo-Avatar and slashed VRAM requirements by 87%. ByteDance (TikTok’s parent co) has released a new video generation model called SeedDance that they claim is better than Veo-3.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Israel is the only country in the world whose right to exist is questioned. And we are not going to apologize for defending our country.” – President Shimon Peres
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congrats Yotam Segev and team Cyera on your impressive $540M series E at a $6 billion valuation for your AI-integrated data protection platform!
- Kudos Amir Elichai and team Carbyne on raising $100M series D for your cloud solution transforms emergency calls into data-rich, real-time response systems.
- Well done Dor Eisner and team Guardz on securing a $56M series B to enhance your AI-native, unified cybersecurity platform for managed service providers (MSPs)
- Fantastic news Alon Chen and team Tastewise on your $50M series B for your AI-powered platform to analyze food and beverage trends and in real-time!
- Great buzz Saar Safra and team Beewise on your $50M series D to scale your AI and robotics tools to address declining bee populations!
- Way to go Gal Sagie and team Hypernative on your $40M series B to remove the security threats to Web3 mass adoption!
- Mazel tov Guy Ezekiel and team Zorro on your $20M series A to transform the healthcare benefits industry!
- Good stuff Maor Ezer and team ai.work on securing a $10M seed round to bring autonomous AI to enterprise workflows!
- Congratulations Ben Luria and team Hirundo on raising an $8M seed round to reduce hallucinations and bias in LLMs!
- Awesome milestone Yoni Benshaul and team Dreamhub on raising a $7M seed round for an AI native CRM designed for B2B SaaS!
- Thumbs up Ran Ben – David and team Unibeam Authentication Solutions on securing a $6M seed round to expand SIM-based authentication technology!
- Kol hakavod Lior Albeck and team Weavy on coming out of stealth with a $4M seed round to help design professionals automate the video and images editing workflow!
- Great news Elliot Katz and team mixus on raising $2.6M seed round for a colleague verification AI agent builder!
- Nice going Tal Atarot and team NimBio on your $2M seed round for your non-invasive AI-powered Inflammometer to predict IBD flares before they strike!
EXITS
- Congrats Amanda Gorton and team Corellium on the acquisition by Cellebrite for an estimated $200M!
APPOINTMENTS
- Congrats Itamar M. on joining the investment team at Hetz Ventures!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES
- The series A crunch just got tighter. Thank (or blame) GenAI – new benchmarks by A16Z show that even if you’re company is not in GenAI, you’re being to compared to them and the bar is higher in terms of revenue and speed.
- Steve Blank at LBS: Lessons from a lean startup legend – considered one of the fathers of the lean startup and customer development movement which inspired a lot of the ethos in the past 15 years, Steve Blank dished some truths on entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley vs. Europe and the AI revolution. Worth a read!
- Betting on people: what VCs look for at the pre-seed stage: the green and red flags that pre-seed investors assess from the first meeting
ISRAEL
- Andreessen Horowitz targets elite IDF alumni for startup accelerator
- The 2025 Energy tech landscape map by Startup Nation Central
- Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking 2025 report by Startup Genome ranks Tel Aviv in 4th place globally
GLOBAL
- The gentle Singularity – by Sam Altman
- The Future of Venture Capital – A podcast with Marc Andreessen on the Evolution of the Venture Playbook, fund size and challenging traditional investment approaches
- Europe VC outlook 2025 – by Vintage Investment Partners
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Tel Aviv ranks 4th in the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2025 by Startup Genome (source)
The 2025 Israeli Energy tech map by Startup Nation Central was added to my VC Cafe collection. There are 350 companies in the energy sector in Israel, and they’ve raised $400M in the past years alone. The landscape map features 165 startups in eight key subsectors: Energy Generation, Energy Storage, Behind-the-Meter, Grid Infrastructure (Transmission & Distribution), Hydrogen, Cybersecurity (OT systems), Carbon Capture & Storage (CCUS), and Waste-to-X.
The Internet is DOWN (source)
OpenAI hits $10 billion in annualized revenue fueled by ChatGPT growth and looking at a data sample from Ramp it’s clear to see how far ahead they are in subscriptions compared to their competition. (source)
The most valuable European private startups by HQ, country by country.
The series A crunch is real and even if your startup is not a GenAI company, it’s being compared to GenAI companies. The bar for revenue has gone up, according to new benchmarks released by Andreessen Horowitz (more on this on my VC Cafe post)
Data from 9,000+ startups that raised rounds since 2021 says the median option pool after a Seed round sits at ~12% according to Carta
The talent wars in AI are heating up and top talent is being offered millions to join. Anthropic has the highest ~80% retention 2 years in and is the #1 (large) company top AI researchers wants to go according to SignalFire
Takeaways on the state of Consumer AI from a recent A16Z podcast – bottom line – now it’s a great time to be building in this space. (source)
The differences between SEO and GEO (generative engine optimisation) according to Vercel (source)
The open-source toolkit for building AI Agents. Full breakdown with GitHub repos links https://lnkd.in/g3fntJVc
That’s all for this week. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating and be safe.
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.
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – February 27, 2026 - February 27, 2026
- The Rise of the Personal AI Agent - February 26, 2026
- Pre-Seed Is Stronger than ever, but less startups are getting funded - February 25, 2026
