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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
Historic. Moving. Finally able to breathe. Those are only some of the ways to describe this week as 20 living Israeli hostages were reunited with their families. For most Israelis, the feeling is that it’s finally October 8. We owe a great gratitude to the IDF, President Trump and the negotiating teams for making it happen. The work is not done: the remains of 19 Israeli hostages are still in G**a, in violation of the agreement, and we must #BRINGTHEMHOME until the last one is back. There are many open questions about the ‘day after’ but for now, lets enjoy a new dawn, heal, rebuild, unite and celebrate the end of two hellish years. Am Israel chai! ??
Official Q3 2025 reports are out. This past quarter, Israeli startups raised $2.23 billion across 116 funding rounds. It represents a 24% drop from the previous quarter and a 10% decline compared with Q3/2024. What’s interesting is that when excluding rounds above $200 million, Q3/2025 recorded the highest fundraising volume since early 2023, reflecting a 20% increase over Q2/2025 and a 50% jump compared to the same period last year. Cybersecurity and Generative AI companies attracted the bulk of funding, with 41 deals capturing nearly 60% of all capital.
In the wider tech world, Google DeepMind collaborated with Yale University to find a whole new cancer treatment and is releasing Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B (C2S-Scale), a new 27 billion parameter foundation model designed to understand the language of individual cells. Deepmind is also partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems to use AI to speed the development of fusion as a clean energy source. Anthropic launched ‘skills’ for Claude, which might be a bigger deal than MCP. Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati‘s Thinking Machines Lab has defected to Meta after previously declining a $1.5 billion (with a B) pay package. Meta also poached another key Apple AI engineer for its AI superintelligence lab. ByteDance made China’s most popular AI chatbot, which has overtaken DeepSeek. OpenAI relaxed a bit its guidelines and is now offering verified adults have Erotica chats with the bot. OpenAI also updated Sora 2 with Storyboards, longer video support. Google launched its newest AI video model, Veo 3.1, with richer audio, better realism, more controls. Microsoft is adding features that let workers describe what they want in a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file in a Copilot prompt.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” – Mexican proverb
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Alex Bouaziz and team Deel on securing a $300M series E at a $17.3 billion valuation!
- Mabruk Eran Inbar and team Prisma Photonics on your $30M series D to turn ordinary fibre networks into global security and power-grid sentinels!
- Kudos Dave Mor and team OneLayer on raising a $28M series A to secure the next wave of 5G private networks!
- Way to go Moshik Cohen-Kutner and team Omnix Medical on your $25M series C to tackle drug-resistant infections with your novel antimicrobial peptide theraphy!
- Mazel tov Ariel Hitron and team Second Nature on raising $22M series B to transform how companies coach sales people with AI!
- Thumbs up Le’ora Lichtenstein, CFA and team Corbel to bring AI to industrial equipment sales!
- Kol hakavod Ido Deutsch and team Argu AI on your $2M seed round to turn real-time CCTV video feeds into interactive agents using natural language!
EXITS
- Well done Erez Dror and team Genda (a Buildots company) on the acquisition by Buildots for an undisclosed sum!
- Congrats Manish Narula and team Cybereason on the acquisition by LevelBlue for an undisclosed sum.
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- Why DTC startups are investing in the new era of Brick and Mortar retail – omnichannel is the new eCommerce as DTC brands come to the high street
- Join the r/startuplandscapes community on Reddit, Inc.! New maps added this week including Agentic Commerce
ISRAEL
- Cease-Fire Could Lift Prospects for Israeli VCs, Startups – The potential end of the conflict with Hamas is spurring foreign investors to re-engage with Israel’s startup and venture community – by The Wall Street Journal
- The Q3 2025 Israeli tech review – by IVC Data and Insights, Gornitzky GNY and KPMG
- ‘Home, home’: Israel erupts as hostages are freed – by Financial Times
- Bonus: “Avinatan has come home”: Jensen Huang hails release of Nvidia engineer after two years in Hamas captivity
GLOBAL
- ‘Of course it’s a bubble’: AI start-up valuations soar in investor frenzy – Unprecedented funding leads 10 groups including OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI to gain almost $1tn in value in past year – by the Financial Times
- Israeli-American among three awarded Nobel prize in economics – Born in the Netherlands and raised in Haifa, Joel Mokyr is a world-renowned economic historian, known for his research on the history of technological innovation and sustained growth by The Times of Israel
- The New World: Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The state of Israeli tech in Q3 2025
Efficient compute market map by Buoyant Ventures (source)
How Nvidia and OpenAI fuel the AI money machine… (source)
AI years are like dog years. One year in AI advancement equals 7 in Internet advancement.
U.S. VCs have splashed $161B YTD on AI bets (source)
“The quantity of AI-generated articles has surpassed the quantity of human-written articles being published on the internet”
The odds of making it to $1M ARR and beyond… people forget that companies like Lovable are the exception, not the rule (by Kyle Poyar)
To quash the rumours, Lovable‘s founder makes it very clear that it’s not dying…
China put a restriction on rare earths exports, and it’s a good opportunity to remind ourselves what might choke the global semiconductor market.
Chinese companies built the most used open-source AI models…
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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