It’s #Firgun time!
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Last week was the first time I ‘missed’ sending the Firgun newsletter (without previously announcing) in the past 5 years. I had a good reason, it was my son’s Bar Mitzvah and we celebrated it in Israel. I’m very proud of him and will treasure those memories. The good news? this week is a ‘double’ edition, including last week’s updates.
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. I’m happy to share another milestone this week: it’s been 21 years (!) since I started my blog, https://www.vccafe.com.
Over the past two weeks, despite regional tensions, the Israeli tech ecosystem continues to demonstrate a strong position in AI, cyber and defence. An official visit from India’s prime minister, a secret visit by Palmer Luckey and the continued string of M&A Deals are proof that Israeli resilience is currently in high demand.
In the wider tech world, the landscape was reshaped by a seismic shift in the streaming wars as Netflix officially walked away from its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery , effectively clearing the path for a rival takeover by Paramount– Skydance. In the AI sector, Anthropic is locked in a high-stakes standoff with the U.S. Department Defense after CEO Dario Amodei refused to remove safety guardrails for military use, leading the Pentagon to threaten the company with a “supply chain risk” designation. OpenAI significantly deepened its enterprise footprint by launching Frontier, a platform for managing autonomous “AI coworkers,” while simultaneously rolling out GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark and a seamless design-to-code integration with Figma. To compete with OpenClaw, Perplexity launched its own ‘Computer mode’ – Google overhauled its creative suite with the release of Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), which brings the reasoning power of its “Pro” models to its high-speed Flash architecture for real-time image editing. China’s AI giants made a massive push into video generation, with ByteDance unveiling Seedance 2.0 for hyper-realistic 4K visuals and Kuaishou Technology launching Kling 3.0 with native audio synchronization. Alibaba Group and Moonshot AI disrupted the market pricing tiers by releasing the Qwen 3.5 and Kimi K2.5 models, respectively, offering agentic capabilities at a fraction of Western costs. The venture market saw a return of the “Mega Round,” led by UK-based Wayve securing $1.5 billion series D from SoftBank , NVIDIA, and Uber to scale embodied AI for autonomous driving. Another autonomous driving company called Waabi raised $1 billion to accelerate the commercial deployment of autonomous trucks. Meta did a $60 billion chip deal with AMD and another multi billion dollar deal with Google as it pivoted from making own advanced AI chips. Finally, Stripe confirmed its dominance in the fintech space with a secondary sale that boosted its valuation to a staggering $159 billion (74% increase), while Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs hit unicorn status with a $1B round (including $200M from Autodesk) for spatial intelligence.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality.”
Lao Tzu
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Well done Alon Gromakov and team Gambit Security for coming out of stealth with $61M in funding (a $56M series A and previously undisclosed seed round) for its AI native resilience platform that ensures digital continuity never expires!
- Congratulations Yoav Einav and team Guidde on raising a $50M series B to turn employee workflows into structured knowledge for automation!
- Kudos Uriel Knorovich and team Nimble on your $47M series B to search the web in real time, verify and validate the results, and structure the information into neat tables that can then be queried like a database!
- Mazel tov Alon Noy (Neuhaus) and team Astelia on securing a $25M series A (and a previously undisclosed $10M seed) to reveal true vulnerability exposure through reachability analysis!
- Awesome job Rotem Lurie and team Venice on your $25M series A to tackle both cloud-based and on-premises environments security!
- Way to go Yoni Leitersdorf and team Solid (AI for Data) on raising a $20M seed to help large organisations make internal data usable, and trustworthy, for non-technical teams!
- Kudos Sigal Kalmanson Cusnir and team Starget Pharma on securing $18M series A to advance your AI-driven radiopharmaceutical cancer therapies!
- Great news Daniel Liechtenstein and team Hypercore on raising a $13.5M series A for a commercial loan management platform for private credit funds!
- Big thumbs up Amos Bar-Joseph and team Swan AI on raising a $6M seed round for AI agents to help your sales team identify, qualify and engage leads showing intent!
EXITS
- Big congrats Lior Blik and team Magic Software Enterprises on the $2.84 billion acquisition by Matrix!
- Congratulations Amit Assaraf ? and team Koi on the $400M acquisition by Palo Alto Networks while still being in stealth! It was so quick that the employees didn’t even get a chance to be awarded options.
- Awesome milestone Tomer Shlomi and team MetaSight Diagnostics on the acquisition by Guardant Health for up to $150M for your liquid biopsy test!
- Amazing news Inna Tokarev Sela and team illumex on the acquisition of your Generative Semantic Fabric by NVIDIA for $60M!
- Kudos Nadav Kemper and team Quack AI (Acq. by AUI) on the acquisition by AUI™ (Augmented Intelligence) for an estimated $15M to bring AI to customer support.
NEW FUNDS
- Big congrats Hila Rom and Tammy Mahn on the launch of FutureFirst, a $50M early stage fund focused on Israeli Vertical AI startups!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- Pre-seed is stronger than ever but less startups are getting funded – a post packed with benchmarks, based on the 2025 state of pre-seed report by Carta and H1 2026 report by SVB
- The rise of the personal AI Agent – more and more founders have shared with me how they leverage OpenClaw – it’s a massive shift in founder productivity and we’re just at the beginning.
- Congratulations to Tom Arad and team Bridge.cx (post-sales AI agents to increase up-sells and reduce churn) on coming out of stealth this week!
ISRAEL
- Reasons to be optimistic about Israeli tech in 2026 – a few facts that make me even more excited about investing in Israeli startups with Remagine Ventures
- Report by Innoviz Technologies on physical AI and world models
- An interesting analysis of academic papers showed that when the amount of capital flowing into VC funds doubled, the valuations of the startups those funds invested in increased by 7-21%. But success rates did not change. by Dor Lee-Lo
- India and Israel pledge to boost ties in defence and technology
GLOBAL
- 2026 Compensation & Equity Trends Report by Sequoia Capital
- Build vs. Buy? Durability in the agentic AI era by ICONIQ
- The 2028 global intelligence crisis by Citrini Research created another slide in SaaS public company shares, claiming that AI can now build anything – it has since been toned down
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The AI-driven shift in the productivity landscape is moving from task-oriented applications to autonomous agents, where deep enterprise context, rather than just “AI features”, becomes the primary competitive moat. by Sapphire Ventures (source)
Funding to gaming startups went down 55% in 2025, despite record revenues (source: Matthew Ball)
Less companies received pre-seed funding in 2025 (based on US data by Carta) but the net dollar amount invested only went down a mere 1% (source: State of pre-seed 2025)
Top 40 AI GTM plays by Kyle Poyar – where is AI delivering measurable impact for GTM teams (source)
GenAI use-cases in K-12 education (source)
Company density and funding by AI Agent market (source: CB Insights)
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.
- 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
