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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
I’m sending this week’s edition from the plane between Ben Gurion Airport and Heathrow, following a productive week in Israel. I want to give a big shout out this week to Natti Ginor, Omer Geller, Raphael Bejarano and the entire Jefferies team for putting together a superb multi-day event in Tel Aviv that brought together top investors (Bill Ackman, Gavin Baker, Dan Loeb, David Fialkow and many others) as well as entrepreneurs and ecosystem leaders to shine a spotlight on Israel and Israeli tech. Not to be taken for granted these days. In the event, I also had the chance to meet Noa Argamani, whose fiancé Avinatan is still in G**a for over 705 days. I committed to her that we will not forget about the hostages and will continue to advocate for their return. #BRINGTHEMHOME NOW ??
The theme that stood out this week was Resilience. You need resilience to build great companies. But Israeli entrepreneurs have given a whole new meaning to what it means to be resilient. This week as we remembered the victims of 9/11, I was reminded that resilience is not only about bouncing back from hardship, but about standing firm in your values. Entrepreneurs, like nations, are tested in moments of crisis. Resilience is what allows them not just to survive, but to emerge stronger.
In the wider tech world, OpenAI has reportedly signed a $300 billion contract with Oracle, which catapulted Larry Ellison became the world’s richest person. OpenAI and Microsoft have also reportedly signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding for new terms of their relationship. Anthropic has agreed to pay a $1.5 billion settlement to book authors in a class-action copyright lawsuit. Mistral AI‘s valuation has doubled to $14 billion with a new $1.3 billion investment from ASML. Cognition has reached a $10 billion valuation with a new $400M funding round. Apple has launched its new iPhone lineup with a focus on new hardware and the new Airpods will have a live translation feature. After a long wait, Klarna has had its long-awaited IPO, with its shares rising 15% on the first day of trading, reaching a market cap of $17 billion. Nebius is aiming to raise $3 billion following a new contract with Microsoft. Physical Intelligence, a robotics startup, is in talks to raise funding at a $5 billion valuation. Amazon‘s autonomous ride-hailing service, Zoox, has launched to the public in Las Vegas. AI Agents startup Sierra has raised $350M additional capital at a valuation of $10B. Perplexity finalised a round of funding valuing the company at $20B. It also received a lawsuit from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. for scraping its website and directing the traffic to its AI overviews. Alibaba Group released Qwen3-Next, a new 80B parameter model with two versions (Instruct and Thinking).
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“What we have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.” – Charlie Kirk
(from a 2018 Turning Point USA event on free speech challenges at universities, as referenced in his book Campus Battlefield and echoed in various interviews).
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Way to go Shai Cohen and team proteanTecs on your $51M Series D to for your automotive chip monitoring platform!
- Good stuff Robin Gilthorpe and team Earnix on your $50M series D extension (and $290M secondary sale) for your insurtech platfom!
- Well done Amit Assaraf ? and team Koi on raising a $38 million Series A round to develop a new layer of protection for enterprise endpoints!
- Congratulations Erez Kaminski and team Ketryx on securing a $39 million Series B to streamline medical device compliance!
- Kudos Dor Zvi and team Red Access on securing a $17 million Series A to simplify enterprise security at the edge!
- Congrats Micha Rave and team Hush Security on raising an $11M seed round to secure machine-to-machine communication without vaults!
- Mazal tov Assaf Sagy and team Dazl on coming out of stealth with a $10M seed round to build mobile apps with AI!
- Big thumbs up Michal Lupu and team Blocks on coming out of stealth with a $10M seed round for your custom AI agent platform!
- Kol hakavod Nadav Kemper and team Quack AI on raising a $7 million seed round to bring proactive AI to customer support
- Great news Moshe Vaknin and team lizo.ai on securing a $4M seed round to provide predictive analytics for real estate investments!
- Big congrats Asaf Peled and team Minute Media on the undisclosed strategic round valuing the company at $1.4 billion! (full disclosure: I’m an investor via Remagine Ventures)
EXITS
- Congratulations Daniel Ramot and team Via on completing an IPO valuing the company at $3.5 billion!
- Well done Benjamin Gillman and team myInterview on the acquisition by Radancy for an undisclosed sum!
- Kudos Rotem Lesher and team Apeiro Motion on the acquisition by Ondas estimated at $12M
- Not all exits are great, but nevertheless an outcome. Congrats Asher Levy and team Landa Digital Printing on the $80M acquisition by Fimi Opportunity Funds.
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES / VC CAFE
- Vibe Idea validation with GenAI – how founders can leverage AI to quickly prototype, test their market, hypotheses, competition, user preferences, etc.
- We published The Remagine Ventures Monthly Pulse – while the summer time tends to be quieter in venture, we’ve been busy over the summer and unveiled 3 new investments
- My Reddit, Inc. community r/startuplandscapes is growing! New this week: construction tech startup map, data centre landscape map, and AI Native office tools
ISRAEL
- AI Adoption globally and in Israel – a report by Startup Nation Central
- Bill Ackman: I want to invest another $1b in Israel
- The H1 2025 Israel investor report by IVC Data and Insights and Gornitzky GNY
GLOBAL
- The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Fight for America’s Soul – by The Free Press
- How China’s focus on efficiency over scale propelled Chinese AI models like Qwen to exceed Western competitors with over 400 million downloads while delivering comparable performance at 40% lower costs.
- AI predictions for 2027
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israeli AI ecosystem by Startup Nation Central and Jefferies
Israeli VC fund capital raising (doesn’t include micro funds) by IVC Data and Insights
The AI Native office stack: from horizontal “do-it-all” agents to deep vertical specialists, across real tasks like email, spreadsheets, and slides. By Andreessen Horowitz (source)
Big tech’s AI fuelled spending surge
AI Companies in the MSP and MSSP space by Fortino Capital (source)
Agentic commerce report by Citi (source)
Evaluating moats in vertical AI (source) by Elucid
There may be a little fundraising light at the end of the tunnel. Startups that raised their seed rounds in 2024 are graduating to Series A a bit faster than their counterparts did in 2023. The trend is positive. Data by Carta (source)
Don’t forget the hostages.
That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading.
There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!
Eze Vidra
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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