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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 the concept of Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
With the non-stop news, it’s easy to forget that there are still 50 Israelis rotting in the tunnels of G**a for 643 days. We need to #BRINGTHEMHOME to enable them, their families and the nation heal ??
Amongst the various tech headlines in Israel this week, including more than $670M in new funds, a few exits and some high profile appointments (warm welcome to Adam Valkin to the Israeli venture ecosystem), NVIDIA‘s new multi billion campus planned in Israel (see links section below) is a huge positive sign for the Israeli tech industry. Not only for the 3,000-5,000 new jobs it will offer, but also for the potential for increased M&A by chip and AI giant.
In the wider tech world, Global startup funding hit $91 billion in Q2 2025 an 11% increase from last year’s Q2. NVIDIA as mentioned became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market cap. Meta invested $3.4 billion in Luxottica to double down on their smart glasses line (which currently includes Ray-Ban and Oakley). xAI launched Grok-4 – it’s showing impressive results but seems to “consult” Elon Musk’s opinions on sensitive topics. Musk said that Grok is coming to Tesla cars “very soon”. Remember the nightrider? OpenAI is working on an AI-powered web browser, and you can guess that Google won’t be the default search. Microsoft says it saved $500m in its call centres alone last year thanks to AI, and that 35% of its code is written by AI. Apple COO Jeff Williams to retire, Sabih Khan named successor (this is a big deal, but it doesn’t sound like massive change is coming). Apple is also rumoured to looking into buying Perplexity for $14Bn to fix its AI woes. Have you heard of Bitchat? Jack Dorsey created a chat app that communicates using Bluetooth – no wifi or cellular network required. Cloudflare is enabling publishers to block LLMs and charge for scraping their content. Google now lets users transform an image into a video with Veo3. Bitcoin reached $117,000, the highest price to date (lets see how this ages). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching an AI Agents marketplace, in collaboration with Anthropic. Finally, these Chinese AI avatars sold $7.6M worth of merchandise in a live stream, outperforming the human hosts.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts” – General Omar Bradley
NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS
- Way to go Dan Bratshpis and team INSHUR on securing $35M in new funding to accelerate R&D into autonomous vehicle insurance!
- Mabruk Amir Haramaty and team aiOla on securing a $25M strategic series A2 to transform operations through AI with real-time, voice-driven data!
- Congrats Gilad Marom and team Restore Medical on raising a $23 series B to advance your first-in-class heart-failure device!
- Great stuff Guy Leibovitz and team Nominal on raising a $20M series A to bring AI automation to CFOs with AI agents for enterprise resource planning!
- Kudos Zivan Ori and team Datafy.io on raising a $20M seed round for your autonomous cloud storage optimisation platform!
- Big thumbs up Yossi Reitblat and team Ryft on raising an $8M seed round for intelligent data pipeline management without the lock-in!
- Well done Asaf Israelit and team Parter on coming out of stealth with a $5.5M seed round to help hardware manufacturers manage supply chain complexities with AI!
EXITS
- Belated congratulations to Amir Bassan-Eskenazi and team CommonGround-AI on the acquisition by Apple for an undisclosed sum.
- Well done Kobi Stok and team Forwrd.ai (Acquired by Pendo) on the acquisition by Pendo.io for an undisclosed sum!
APPOINTMENTS
- Huge congrats Adam Valkin on joining Vine Ventures, L.P. as Partner to invest in early stage Israeli startups! Great addition to the Israeli investor ecosystem!
- Congratulations Ori Barzilay on joining Team8 as the newest cybersecurity partner!
NEW VENTURE FUNDS
- Big congrats Yaniv Stern, Yoram Oron, Barak Salomon and team Red Dot Capital Partners on securing a $320M fund 3 to invest in early growth Israeli startups!
- This one is a bit different… big congrats Gili Raanan and team Cyberstarts on securing $300M for a new Employee Liquidity Fund, a new initiative that gives dedicated talent in the portfolio purchase their options…
- Big mazal tov Daniel Cohen, Oren Charnoff and team Sticker Ventures on announcing your new $50M early stage fund to invest in Israel consumer startups! Can’t wait to find our first deal together with Remagine Ventures!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES
- AI Adoption is starting with consumers first – ChatGPT passed Wikipedia in web traffic. Consumers are willing to pay for convenience and enhanced productivity and VC funding is following suit
- How to land and excel your VC summer internship – fresh out of a new round of interviews for summer interns, I shared advice that is applicable for all early-career job seekers
- AI note takers: the new meeting etiquette conundrum – in a recent virtual demo day I attended, the Zoom list showed 50 participants, but only 10 were human. How do you feel about AI recording your meetings?
ISRAEL
- Nvidia doubles down on Israel with multi billion dollar mega Campus – this move is expected to add 5,000 jobs, making NVIDIA the largest tech employer in Israel, replacing Intel Corporation. I am also optimistic about the implications to Israeli M&A…
- Despite ongoing war, investments in Israeli startups hit three year high – in 2024, Israeli startups raised approximately $10.5 billion. In the first half of 2025 they’ve already secured $9.3 billion…
- Mapping Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem: Funding doubles despite global headwinds – Israeli cybersecurity startups attracted 38% of the funding in 2024. They also represent 40% of all US venture investments in cybersecurity.
GLOBAL
- Q2 Global Venture Funding Climbs In A Blockbuster Quarter For AI And As Capital Concentrates In Larger Companies – data by Crunchbase
- State of the markets H1 2025 – global data by Silicon Valley Bank
- https://shaunmaguire.support – if you’ve been following Shaun Maguire, take a minute to read this and support
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Don’t best against Israel. Since June 13, 2025 (the start of the war with Iran), Israel’s shekel strengthened 6.6%, its TA-35 stock index surged 14% in dollar terms, and 10-year bond yields fell 44 basis points, all outperforming global peers. (by Bloomberg/ source)
Israeli startup fundraising reached $1.9 billion in Q2 2025 – by CB Insights
Cybersecurity landscape by Startup Nation Central (source) was added to my 2025 Israeli startup landscape collection on VC Cafe
The Israeli 2025 Quantum snapshot by Earth & Beyond Ventures shows that there are 9 Israeli startups operating in the space, which collectively raised $650M – the map was added to my 2025 Israeli startup landscape collection
VCs are expecting more revenue, better metrics, and stronger momentum than they ever have for series A based on data by Carta.
Global venture funding +11% YoY to $91B in Q2 (source)
The Govtech AI tech landscape by Greenfield Partners
And congrats to OnlyFans for being the most revenue-efficient company in the world!
Advice for young professionals – how to spend your 20s in the AI era by the Y Combinator team: rethink education and college, gain domain expertise rapidly (technical skills), navigate the shifting job landscape… (In some ways I’m glad I’m not 20 anymore!)
The first hardware product by Hugging Face is out – Meet Reachy Mini, the first open source AI robot…
That’s all for this week, thanks for tuning in. Please like, comment or share!
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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