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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
Israel has already agreed to President Trump’s 20 point proposal, which if accepted would lead to the end of the war and return of the 48 ho**ages. One can only hope that we finally #BRINGTHEMHOME.
Israeli startups raised $585M in 23 disclosed deals in September, reaching a total of $2.23B in Q3 2025 (according to preliminary numbers). This reflects a 24% decline compared to the previous quarter, and 10% below Q3 2024. That being said, when excluding mega rounds of $200M and up, Q3 saw a 20% increase in funding compared to Q2 2025, and 50% more than the equivalent quarter in 2024. GenAI and Cybersecurity startups represented 60% of the total funding invested.
In the wider tech world, OpenAI is now the world’s most valuable private company at $500 billion valuation. The company launched a new app called Sora (already #1 in the app store) as well as a new text to video model, Sora2, that is already making waves. OpenAI has also partnered with Shopify and Etsy to enable checking out directly from ChatGPT. Mira Murati‘s new startup Thinking Machines Lab (that famously raised $2 billion in ‘seed’ funding that valued the company at $10 billion pre-product), has released it’s first product, Tinker, which supports model fine tuning. Anthropic has unveiled its latest model Claude Sonnet 4.5. Elon Musk is close to becoming a Trillionaire as his personal wealth soars north of $500 billion. Electronic Arts (EA) has been bought for $55 billion, the largest ever private equity buyout, by a consortium including Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner. IBM launched Granite 4.0, dubbed “The Western Qwen”, a family of open source hybrid LLMs ready for enterprise use. Periodic Labs raised a whooping $300M seed round to create “AI scientists”. Vercel, who’s founder Guillermo Rauch received a lot of online hate for attending a tech event with Bibi, announced a $300M new round valuing the company at $9.3bn. Accenture plans to ‘exit’ staff who cannot be retrained for age of AI and xAI‘s Grok is launching Grokopedia to compete with Wikipedia.
To those who fasted yesterday – gmar hatima tova!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
Pablo Picasso
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congrats Doron Sharon and team Descope on your $35M seed extension (bringing the total seed round to $88M) to create and manage identity journeys for users, partners, and AI agents through no-code and low-code workflows!
- Well done Itzik Daniel Michaeli and team Commcrete on securing a $21M series A (and previously undisclosed $8M seed round) to expand your ultra-compact tactical satellite communication tech, enabling secure voice and data transfer from anywhere on Earth!
- Mabruk Tal B. and team Gelt on your $13M series A to modernise tax planning and services with AI!
- Way to go Iddo Gino and team Datawizz on coming out of stealth with a $12.5M seed round to replace LLMs with smaller, specialised language models!
- Kudos Michael Gabay and team Gain on raising a $12M to deliver AI agents designed to take over procurement and operational workflows from end to end!
EXITS
- Well done Matan Mates and team Pelanor on the acquisition by Kela Technologies estimated at tens of millions for your AI-based platform to help organisations analyse cloud spending in real time and reduce costs through recommendations and automation!
- Congrats Haggai Hofland and team Fine | AI App Building & Management on the acquisition of your AI-assisted coding and rapid application development tools by HoneyBook for an undisclosed sum.
NEW FUNDS
- Congrats Amir Fishelov and team Square One Labs on the launch of your $30M fund to invest in Israeli early stage Energy Tech, industry and robotic startups!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- Service as a Software – AI startups tackling the $4 trillion services sector – legal, accounting, consulting are feeling the impact of AI agents
- Israel is positioned as major deep tech hub (largest outside of the US) in latest report by Dealroom.co and Israel Innovation Authority
- The $100 Trillion Bet: Why World Models, Not LLMs, Define the Next Frontier of AI Investment – simulating the real world with AI and it’s all starting from gaming
- Delighting Users: The Forgotten Art of Being Memorable – when is the last time you were delighted by a product or service?
ISRAEL
- Israeli deep tech report 2025 – An excellent report by Dealroom.co and Israel Innovation Authority (see media section below)
- State of Israeli High Tech 2025 – another report by Israel Innovation Authority (broader focus)
- VCs can’t get enough of Israeli cybersecurity startups – Business Insider
GLOBAL
- A new a16z report looks at which AI companies startups are actually paying – by TechCrunch
- forMore Thoughts on the Existential Crisis in Seed: One Question, Two Views of the World – by NextView Ventures
- Mercor launches the AI Productivity Index (APEX), which evaluates AI models’ ability to perform “economically valuable knowledge work”; GPT-5 leads the index – by Mercor
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Key trends in Israeli high tech (source)
One of the many interesting figures from the Israeli Deep Tech snapshot 2025 report on the number of active deep tech startups in Israel by field (see more in my VC Cafe post).
Preliminary figures from IVC Data and Insights & LeumiTech Q3/2025 Tech Review
The Israeli Service as a Software landscape by Grove Ventures (source) and my commentary on AI startups tacking the $4 trillion service industry
This is a fascinating chart by Andreessen Horowitz on where startups really spend on AI… This data is limited to transactions made via Mercury such as ACH, IO card spend, and wires.(source)
The UK GenAI market map by Molten Ventures includes over 250+ funded generative AI startups (you’ll find this and many more maps on my Reddit, Inc. community r/startuplandscapes)
The autonomous remediation cyber landscape by Forgepoint Capital find it in r/startuplandscapes
Have you been the victim of AI ‘workslop’? AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task. Harvard Business Review says its on the rise (source)
109 Chinese electric card brands positioning (imagine what it would do to $TESLA stock if there were no tariffs…)
That’s all for this week. Thank you 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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