It’s #Firgun time! The original version of this newsletter was published on Linkedin. Subscribe now to join 7,400 subscribers and get the next edition directly in your inbox.
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. In November #FIRGUN officially celebrated 5 years. See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going. Next milestone: 21 years to VC Cafe in December! Time flies when you’re having fun.
Happy new year from freezing London. I will take the opportunity to wish readers of #FIRGUN a happy and prosperous new year. I wonder what 2026 has in store for us?
In Israeli tech and venture, preliminary numbers by IVC Data and Insights show a very strong showing for Israeli startups in 2025. Israeli startups capital raising reached $11.1 billion across 418 rounds, a 15% increase in total capital raised compared with 2024, but a 9% decline in the number of rounds. This reflect a higher concentration of capital, also in terms of sectors with Cyber and AI dominating, approximately representing 70% of total capital raised during the year. In Q4 2025, capital raising totalled $3.43 billion, up 45% from Q3 and 37% compared with Q4 2024. Exit activity reached high levels in 2025, generating $17.7 billion through 180 M&As and IPOs. In addition, transactions announced but not yet closed are expected to add approximately $63 billion in the coming months, including several large-scale deals. Worth noting that according to preliminary data from Startup Nation Central’s 2025 summary, Israeli startups raised $15.6 billion during the year, while exits totalled $74 billion.
In the wider tech world, the final week of the year was headlined by Meta making a massive power move on December 29th to acquire the autonomous agent startup Manus AI for a reported $2 billion to $3 billion, a deal seen as a critical “talent and tech” grab to accelerate Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of personal superintelligence. SoftBank completed a $22.5B OpenAI investment, finalising its $41B commitment. NVIDIA dropped Nemotron 3 to solidify its dominance in the open-weight model space. The infrastructure sector saw its own earthquake as CoreWeave moved toward finalising its $9 billion acquisition of Core Scientific, securing the massive power and data center footprint needed to scale the next generation of AI clusters. Alphabet Inc. also made a move in that space with the $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect power to expand data centres. In hardware, OpenAI is putting a focus on overhauling its audio models ahead of their mysterious device launch a year from now, and Samsung Electronics grabbed early CES momentum by unveiling the Galaxy Z TriFold and an AI-integrated Freestyle+ projector. Finally, Anthropic deepened its enterprise moat just before the holidays by bringing Claude Code directly into Slack, turning the chat interface into a fully autonomous dev environment. More M&A: NVIDIA said to absorb ~90% of Groq staff, pay out vested shares at ~$20B valuation.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbours, and let every new year find you a better man. — Benjamin Franklin
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Jonathan Langer and team Act Security on raising a $40M series A just four months after completing your seed!
EXITS
- Huge congrats Yevgeny Dibrov and team Armis on the acquisition by ServiceNow for $7.75 billion in cash!
- Congrats Ehud Shafir and team Tiltan Software Engineering LTD on the acquisition by Nukkleus Inc. for a reported $14M!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
There was no new activity last week, but ICYMI
- Don’t make resolutions for 2026. Create your OKRs instead – resolutions require only words. Results take action.
- The 2025 Israeli startup landscape collection on VC Cafe
- 2025 requests for startups
ISRAEL
- Israeli startups raise over $1.6 billion in December, marking strongest funding month since 2022 – Large cybersecurity and AI financings drive the best month of 2025.
- Nvidia is in advanced talks to buy Israel’s AI21 Labs for $2-$3 billion in talent acquisition – Potential deal would come shortly after AI chip giant announced ‘second home’ in Kiryat Tivon
- Tel Aviv shares break record highs in 2025 despite war, outpacing global markets – This year’s local rally outperformed gains in major global indexes, boosted by optimism over the removal of the Iranian threat and a ceasefire deal to end the two-year war in Gaza
GLOBAL
- State of startups 2025 by Carta – Everything you want to know about US startups in 2025 in 145 charts (mostly US data, but filled with great benchmarks)
- 2025: The year in LLMs – a good summary of the major updates in the world of AI in 2025
- And related summary by andrej karphaty
- AI research breakthroughs in 2025 – by Google
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Good news: Israel has climbed two places in the international AI ranking (source)
Israeli tech investments in 2025 by IVC Data and Insights (source)
The 2025 MAD (Machine Learning, AI & Data) Landscape by Matt Turck (source)
The next generation of cyber security by Dawn Capital (source)
The AI Supercycle Has Arrived, With Profound Market Impacts and Important New Lessons for AI Founders – and We Are Just Getting Started by Battery Ventures (source)
Early Stage fundraising cheatsheet by Carta (see their 2025 report in the links section above!)
Where Did $37B in Enterprise AI Spending Go? Departmental AI market map by Menlo Ventures
YouTube leads in all TV, streaming consumption in U.S., above Netflix, Disney (source)
AI boom adds $550B+ to U.S. tech billionaires’ wealth in 2025. Elon Musk topped the list, with his net worth +50% to ~$645B this year (source)
That’s all for this week. 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.
- 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
