It’s #Firgun time!
The original version of this newsletter was published on LinkedIn.
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. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can find previous editions on my blog, VC Cafe.
Two weeks in, and the operational picture is becoming clearer. U.S. CENTCOM reported this week that Iran’s missile attack cadence has been cut by 90%, its navy has been largely dismantled, with over 60 ships sunk, and thousands of high-value targets have been struck across the country, from command centers and air defense systems to missile production facilities and nuclear laboratories. Iran’s offensive capability is measurably diminished from where it was a week ago. The week’s most consequential development on the strategic side: intelligence assessments now suggest Iran is attempting to deploy naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes.
This was, without exaggeration, one of the most consequential weeks for Israeli startup capital in recent memory. The headline belongs to VAST Data, which raised $1 billion in a combination of a $400M Series F and $600M in secondaries, at a $30 billion valuation making it the most valuable private Israeli tech company, surpassing even Wiz (which itself finally closed its $32 billion sale to Google this very week. Vast is an AI infrastructure company building storage and data platforms purpose-built for AI workloads, and this round cements Israel’s position at the foundation layer of the global AI stack. In addition Nebius announced a $2 billion investment from NVIDIA to build the first Israeli supercomputer and scale the cloud for AI and there’s more in the relevant sections below.
In the wider tech world, all eyes are on NVIDIA GTC , which kicks off Monday in San Jose. Jensen Huang has teased a chip reveal that will “surprise the world,” and the conference is expected to surface the Vera Rubin architecture roadmap, an open-source enterprise AI agent platform reportedly codenamed NemoClaw, and Huang’s full articulation of his “5 Layer Cake” thesis: the argument that AI requires simultaneous scaling across energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. NVIDIA this week also confirmed a $2 billion investment in Nebius and disclosed backing for Thinking Machines Lab, the new venture from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with over 1 GW of compute. Netflix reportedly paid up to $600M to acquire InterPositive, Ben Affleck’s AI-powered post-production startup. A clear signal that the major streaming platforms are moving to own AI tooling for content production, not just license it. OpenAI had a complicated week: it announced plans to acquire AI security testing startup Promptfoo as enterprises demand better safety rails for autonomous agents, and its new AppSec agent Codex Security flagged over 11,000 high-severity vulnerabilities in real-world codebases during its first 30 days of testing. On the legislative front, Washington State passed SB 5105 targeting AI-generated deepfakes of minors (93–0), and Utah passed its own AI bill, the beginning of a wave of state-level AI regulation that the industry will need to navigate carefully. Apple unveiled the MacBook Neo at $599, positioning it as a mass-market AI device, and confirmed a partnership with Google to bring Gemini to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure via iOS 26.4. Google also made the biggest revamp to Google Maps adding new 3D and AI features. Meta acquired Moltbook, a social network for AI Agents, and hired its creators. But it’s new super model codename Avocado will be delayed at least until May.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Big congrats Arkady Volozh and team Nebius on the historic $2 billion raise from Nvidia to build a large scale AI cloud infrastructure!
- Way to go Renen Hallak and team VAST Data on your $400M Series F raise (at $30 billion valuation) for AI Infrastructure and $600M in Secondary sales, as well as reaching $2 billion in revenue!
- Well done Gal Krubiner and team Pagaya on your $400M in Debt Financing to provide AI-driven underwriting to improve credit access for real estate!
- Massive kudos Bar Winkler and team Wonderful on your $150M Series B for Agentic AI voice agents for the Enterprise, and for reaching a $2 billion valuation a year from founding the company! ?
- Congrats Ido Livneh ? and team Jazz on securing $43M Series A make DLP systems capable of handling AI-driven data risks!
- Kol ha kavod Maxim Bar Kogan and team Onyx Security on coming out of stealth with a $35M Series A to control AI agents in the enterprise!
- Mazel tov Nati Hazut and team Bold Security on securing a $28M Series A to transform computers into active AI security agents running real-time risk analysis
- Great stuff Matan Hoffmann and team Carefam on raising a $10.5M seed round to leverage conversational AI agents for healthcare staff shortage hiring!
EXITS
- Big respect Assaf Rappaport and team Wiz on the biggest exit in Israel’s history – completing the $32 billion acquisition of your cloud security platform by Google. It’s a massive milestone for the investors, employees and the rest of the market.
- Congrats Ronen Factor, David Dragucki and team BIRD Aerosystems on the acquisition by Ondas Autonomous Systems for an undisclosed sum estimated at $110M to expand Airborne Missile Protection and ISR Capabilities!
NEW FUNDS
- Big kudos to our friends Tal Slobodkin, Netanel Meir, Yuval Cohen and team StageOne Ventures on announcing your $165M fund V to invest in early stage Israeli AI & Cybersecurity – we’re rooting for you and hope to collaborate more with Remagine Ventures!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- The researchers new job is writing the spec – product managers got superpowers with vibe coding and AI agents… now that code writing is democratised, all you need is imagination and best practices of building products
- In 2026 Gaming companies must deal with AI supercycle and VC winter to find new moats – my overview on the state of gaming in 2026 on the 40th anniversary of GDC that took place this week
- How the world of venture is changing in 2026 and why there’s an even bigger need for pre-seed
ISRAEL
- 5 Israeli defense-tech stocks to watch amid the war in Iran
- A record 52 Israelis made Forbes magazine’s 2026 list of the world’s billionaires, with their combined wealth reaching $308 billion, a 24% increase from last year and a 50% jump since 2024
- Israel’s role in lunar infrastructure could define future space power
GLOBAL
- Propaganda is now made for the algorithms and journalism can’t keep up – AI generated content is a new front in warfare – for the public opinion
- Why Anthropic is described as The Most Disruptive Company in the World
- Primer on world models by Bessemer Venture Partners
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Interesting research by Anthropic on the impact of AI on jobs (source)
Jensen Huang’s 5 Layer cake AI model (source)
The future of law landscape by Commonweal Ventures
AI Native service providers are all the rage right now (source)
Software is moving from tools ? to doing the work itself (source: Julien Bek, Sequoia Capital)
For data Agents, context is the bottleneck. Landscape by Andreessen Horowitz (source)
The most popular GenAI web products and GenAI mobile apps by unique monthly visits A16Z consumer top 100 rankings (source)
The deep tech VC framework by HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds
The OpenClaw Market map – a new ecosystem is surging, just 60 days since the introduction of OpenClaw (source)
Andrej Karpathy released ‘OpenResearch’, a single-GPU setup where AI agents autonomously edit and test LLM training code in 5-minute runs, improving validation loss through git-committed iterations while humans refine guiding prompts. (source)
Closing the chasm from vibe coding to enterprise grade AI apps, a landscape by Dawn Capital (source)
Identity and access management (IAM) in the Age of AI Agents (by Insight Partners, source)
Giving an Agent a unique identity is table stakes. The real challenge is what happens after: dynamic permissions that can’t be statically governed, multi-hop delegation that current standards like OAuth weren’t built for, and the question of how you monitor not just what an Agent can do, but what it’s actually doing.
Am Yisrael Chai. Shabbat shalom, stay safe, and may we hear better news.
There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating!
Eze
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 – March 13 2026 - March 13, 2026
- In 2026 Gaming companies must deal with AI supercycle and VC winter to find new moats - March 12, 2026
- The Researcher’s New Job Is Writing the Spec - March 10, 2026
