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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
Yesterday marked 22 months since Oct 7. You’ve seen the videos. There are 50 Israeli ho**ages still in G**a. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME
Israeli startups raised over $1 billion in July alone. Exits are at an all time high. Israeli startup VAST Data is raising money at $30 billion valuation. All great news… But for the first time in a decade, the workforce is shrinking in a worrying trend. Interesting debates this week on my Israeli feed, on whether it’s possible for startups to secure series A unless they’re in cyber or AI infra and graduates of elite technical units. The answer is ‘it depends’ – the bar for series A has gone up (as you can see in the ‘media’ section below), but cyber has consistently stayed 25% or so of the total capital raised, and didn’t come on the expense of other verticals.
In the wider tech world, this week was packed with announcements as companies rushed to get their news out ahead of the launch of GPT-5, the world’s top frontier model, which was released yesterday. It was OpenAI‘s week in many ways. The company announced $8.3 billion in new funding at $300 billion valuation as part of a $40 billion round. To secure the talent, Sam Altman is giving employees who spent 2 years or more at the company a $1.5M bonus and the company is looking to sell shares at a $500 billion valuation. OpenAI launched GPT OSS their first open source, open weights model. OpenAI also said it would offer ChatGPT to the government for $1 per agency. Google DeepMind launched Genie 3, a world model that lets you not just watch, but explore AI-generated worlds in real-time at 720p and 24fps. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.1, their most advanced agentic coding model ElevenLabs released Eleven Music, their first foray into AI music generation. Unlike Suno, they made a licensing deal with Kobalt Music to get artists paid. MetaStone, a Chinese AI firm, has released XBai o4, a 32B open-source model that excels in complex reasoning capabilities. Apple is looking to invest $100 billion in US manufacturing.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” — Albert Einstein
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Big congratulations Dean Leitersdorf and team Decart on your new $100M series B at $3.1 billion valuation just one year from launch for AI models that cut GPU costs and bring human-like interaction to enterprise AI agents.
- Kudos Gil Mandelzis and team Capitolis on raising a $56M series D from global banks to provide optimisation and capital marketplace solutions aimed at improving efficiency in capital markets!
- Kol hakavod Alon Cohen and team QuamCore on your $26M series A to build million-qubit quantum computer!
- Way to go Rotem Weiss and team Tavily on announcing your $20M series A (and a previously undisclosed $5M seed round) to safely connect enterprises to AI agents!
- Well done Udi Cohen and team Vendict on your $10M series A to reinvent GRC with an AI native platform!
EXITS
- Congrats Itamar Golan and team Prompt Security on the $250M acquisition by SentinelOne two years after your founding!
- Kudos Aki Eldar and team Mirato on the acquisition by Sayari in a deal estimated at tens of millions
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES
- A pre-seed’s fund perspective on investing in Israeli AI startups – where are the big opportunities in AI for Israeli startups, what we look for in founders, and the challenges of allocating capital in AI startups today
- 5 generative AI tools to spark creativity in kids this summer – when it comes to content creation of any kind, generative AI has given us all superpowers, including our kids!
- ICYMI – I started my first community in Reddit! r/startuplandscapes – Whether you’re: ? A founder looking for market whitespace ? An investor exploring emerging categories ? A researcher building industry maps ? A designer visualising startup ecosystems ? Or simply a curious mind tracking how the startup world evolves…You’ve found your tribe :-)
ISRAEL
- No surprises here – Cyber emerges as Israel’s most prolific tech sector – by Globes
- At Black Hat 2025, Israeli cybersecurity firm exposed a critical ‘zero click’ security vulnerability in ChatGPT – by Ynet News
- Andreessen Horowitz eyes elite IDF tech talent in rescheduled Israel visit – by CTech by Calcalist
GLOBAL
- Demis Hassabis on our AI future: ‘It’ll be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution – and maybe 10 times faster’ – by The Guardian
- Apple realised it has to be a real contender in AI – quietly acquired seven startups in 2025 and and they have a GPT competitor in the works, too.
- Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy – As a percentage of US GDP, AI datacenter capex is already larger than peak telecom spending during the dot-com era and is approaching the railroad spending boom, by Paul Kedrosky
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Cyber doesn’t come at other vertical’s expense. Over the last 5-years, cyber investments have accounted for 25%~ of VC dollars in Israel. (H/ T Adam Lazovski)
Honey, the kids are alright. In the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), Israel ranked 6th out of 110 countries. It was Israel’s best result since we started competing in 1979! 6 medals: 4 golds, 1 silver, 1 bronze.
According to research by Stanford University‘s Ilya Strebulaev , 1 in 10 U.S. unicorns (153 out of 1,544) was originally founded outside the U.S. Israel leads the way with 44 unicorns that were founded locally and later scaled in the U.S., making up nearly 29% of all foreign-founded unicorns now based there.
Fortune’s top 50 cyber companies – I counted 15 Israeli startups. A powerful showcase of the Israeli tech and VCs in cyber.
Interesting visualisation of innovation pairings
Winter’s over? According to Peter Walker’s latest Carta State of VC 2025 slides, median valuations are now higher than even the previous peak in 2021/2022 for Seed and Series A deals ?
That being said, the bar has moved up for raising Series A. Revenue expectations are now much higher.
The AI software development market map by Thomvest (source)
The Dual-Use Tech Surge: Innovation’s Double-Edged Sword – landscape of European investors deploying into Defence tech and dual use (source)
The landscape of AI-first services by Point Nine VC (source) Whether it’s insurance claims, tax filings, property management, or immigration law, the underlying work is often highly structured and repeatable, driven by documents, rules, and checklists rather than creative problem-solving. Most of it still runs on PDFs, spreadsheets, and legacy systems.
What emerges is a new class of service business: data-in, judgment-out factories. They run on documents, structured data, and rules-based logic. The output is a decision, classification, or filing, increasingly handled by agents instead of human analysts.
2025 Mid-Year LLM Market Update: Foundation Model Landscape + Economics. A new enterprise LLM leader has emerged as usage and spend surge. by Menlo Ventures (source)
The US Air Force is starting to incorporate cybertrucks in its fleet
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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