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Tomorrow marks officially 5 years since the first #FIRGUN post! See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going.
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
It’s been a meaningful week for me personally. This week as mentioned, #FIRGUN celebrates five years since inception, and yesterday, my team and I celebrated the official launch of Remagine Ventures fund 2 with $25M secured during the war. We’ve taken a page from our founders and stayed in ‘stealth mode’ while doing our first 12 investments in the past few months. It didn’t feel right to announce the news until the hostages were returned and can start coming back to some normality. All I can say is that I appreciate our investors, the founders we’re lucky to partner with and the wider ecosystem that keeps pushing Israeli startups forward. Am Israel chai!
I’m also happy to see that we’re not alone with the sentiment. Despite a slow first half of 2025, new data from the IVC Investors Report shows a sharp rebound Israeli funds fundraising, bringing the total to $1.61 billion across 30 funds (including us). I’m assuming the real number is even higher, which would be welcome news. There’s also a rise in company funding announcements with over $800M secured just this week…
In the wider tech world, there’s been intensifying talk about an AI bubble (it’s not a question of if, but rather, when shit will hit the fan). OpenAI launched GPT 5.1 for developers, a non reasoning model, to generate faster responses. The company also started experimenting with a new group chat feature, maybe in an effort to deepening their grasp of the consumer market. Cursor, the leading AI coding tool, raised $2.3 billion in a new round of funding, valuing the company at $29.3 billion. China’s Baidu, Inc. released a next gen foundation model called Earnie 5, beating GPT-5 performance on charts, document understanding and more. According to some sources, Elon Musk’s xAI raised another $15 billion in a new round of funding. Seems like there’s no end to the hyperscaler’s need (and access) to capital. In gaming, Valve corporation unveiled Steam Machine, a PC-based console designed to bring PC gaming to the living room TV, and a new Steam Controller as well as a Steam Frame VR headset. Anthropic claims to have caught hackers sponsored by the Chinese government using Claude to perform automated cyber attacks against around 30 global organisations. The company also said it will break even by 2028 as OpenAI losses swell to $74B. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has landed the booster of its New Glenn mega-rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean on just its second attempt, the second company to do it following SpaceX – enabling bigger payloads to space. Global eCommerce funding is 90% down from its peak in 2021.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Listing your personal milestones is like storing a pocketful of sunshine for a rainy day.” — Winston Churchill
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Bar Winkler and team Wonderful on securing a $100M series A (just 4 months after your impressive seed!) to automate customer service and sales for global clients with AI Agents!
- Way to go Ofer Shacham and team Majestic Labs ai on the $90M series A (and previously unannounced $10M seed round) to build high-capacity AI servers, , tackling the “memory wall” bottleneck in AI workloads!
- Great news Pavel Gurvich and team Tenzai on your $75M seed round to target the $8B penetration testing market with continuous, software-based defence!
- Kudos Dror Kashti and team Sweet Security on securing your $75M series B to secure enterprises against cloud and AI threats!
- Is it too early to congratulate Shai Morag and his still in stealth company for securing $60M in funding to date?
- Well done Nir Minerbi and team Classiq on securing $30M in a new strategic round of funding for your hardware-agnostic quantum software platform!
- Kol ha kavod Aviv Wolff and team Remilk on securing $20M in funding (from the UAE!) to create real dairy without cows!
- Mazel tov Liad Elidan and team Milestone on your $10M in seed funding to help engineering leaders understand, trust, and optimise how AI coding tools transform their teams!
EXITS
- Big congrats Matan Cohen and team Doti on the impressive $100M acquisition by Salesforce just a year since your founding!
- Way to go Alan Bekker, PhD and team eSelf AI on the acquisition of your AI Avatar platform by Kaltura for a reported $30M!
- Kudos Tal Kain and team Velocity on the acquisition by BigPanda for an undisclosed sum (estimated at below $20M)
NEW FUNDS
- Congrats to my fellow teammates Kevin Baxpehler, Etan Ilfeld and Shanny Rofe on the officially launch of Remagine Ventures II, a $25M pre-seed fund focused on Israeli startups!
- Kudos Moran Leshem Bar, Yaniv Feldman and team Flag Capital on the launch of your debut $15M pre-seed fund focused on Israeli startups! Looking forward to collaborating with you guys!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- Remagine Ventures raises $25 million second fund amid war to back AI startups – our official announcement by CTech by Calcalist
- Remagine breaks silence on $25m fund raised during the war – by Jewish News
- Firgun newsletter turns Five – a bit meta to do #Firgun about Firgun but here we are!
- AI’s Creative Destruction of the Ad Industry
ISRAEL
- Israeli startups raise over $800 million in a week of mega deals as investor confidence surges
- Building Israel’s trillion dollar economy – by Michael Eisenberg
- Israel’s AI sovereignty is off to a late start – it doesn’t have its own infrastructure, says Amir Mizroch
GLOBAL
- All of My Employees Are AI Agents, and So Are My Executives by WIRED
- Accel‘s annual state of the union on software and AI
- The 2025 State of AI Report by McKinsey & Company
- Bonus: Stop the $100M-in-Year-One Panic: A Reality Check for Seed Founders – by Ubiquity Ventures
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
IVC Data and Insights reported a surge in VC capital secured by funds in November. In our case at least, the capital was raised sooner but only announced after the hostages were returned…
Europe and Israel’s AI 100 by Accel
Key players in the AI value chain (source)
Pricing for US SAFE rounds, data by Carta
Use of AI Agents in the enterprise by department/function (source: McKinsey & Company)
What makes unique B2C companies stand out; the Alchemy of N of 1 Consumer Companies (source: Headline)
The semiconductor value chain by (source: Quartr)
Strategies for marketplaces to leverage AI by Andreessen Horowitz
Finally, a OpenAI didn’t quite give us AGI yet, but this is also something…
That’s all for this week. 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.
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – February 27, 2026 - February 27, 2026
- The Rise of the Personal AI Agent - February 26, 2026
- Pre-Seed Is Stronger than ever, but less startups are getting funded - February 25, 2026
