It’s #Firgun time!
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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. 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.
Three weeks into the ‘Lion’s Roar’ operation, my thoughts are first and foremost with the servicemen and women on the front lines; we hope for their safe return and for a lasting peace secured through victory. Meanwhile, a different kind of battle is being waged on the home front: the mission to keep the economy moving despite the sirens. This week’s funding announcements (detailed below) serve as powerful evidence of the grit and unbreakable resilience of the Israeli startup scene.
In the wider tech world, NVIDIA dominated the week with GTC 2026. Jensen Huang unveiled the Vera Rubin platform (now in production, claiming 10x more inference throughput per watt vs. Blackwell), debuted the Groq 3 LPU (the first chip from Nvidia’s $20B Groq acquisition, shipping Q3), previewed the next-gen Feynman architecture targeting 2028, launched DLSS 5 for AI-powered neural rendering, announced autonomous vehicle partnerships with Nissan, BYD, Geely, Isuzu, and Hyundai, and projected $1 trillion in purchase orders through 2027. Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise a $100 billion AI fund focused on buying and automating old manufacturing companies with AI. OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano, its smallest and fastest models yet, with mini outperforming GPT-5 mini on coding and reasoning at 2x the speed. is planning to launch a new desktop ‘superapp’ to refocus and simplify user experience. The company also announced the acquisition of Astral to strengthen coding tools and compete with Anthropic. Meta signed a $27B infrastructure deal with Nebius, one of the first large-scale deployments of Vera Rubin, expanding a prior $3B commitment ninefold. At the same time, Zuckerberg announced that Meta is preparing for a 20% workforce reduction… Apple surprise-launched the AirPods Max 2 with the H2 chip, its first premium headphone refresh since 2020. Cursor announced Composer 2, its own coding model that beats Claude Opus 4.6 at 86% less cost. Google introduced two new products this week – ‘vibe design’ with Stitch and new full stack ‘vibe coding’ with Google AI Studio. DoorDash launched Dasher Task, a new initiative that pays Dashers to film videos of everyday tasks to train AI. Mistral AI launched Forge so companies can train AI on their own data.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can’t.” — Jerry Rice
NEW FUNDING DEALS
- Way to go Danny Brickman and team Oasis Security on securing a $120M series B to secure the rise of AI agents!
- Kudos Yair Grindlinger and team Surf.ai coming out of stealth with a $47M series A (and previously undisclosed $10M in seed funding) for your agentic operations platform for security teams!
- Kol ha kavod Alon Matas and team Strawberry.me on your $35M series A for your coaching platform!
- Well done Amit Megiddo and team Native on coming out of stealth with $31M series A (and previously undisclosed $11M seed round) for your Cloud Security Control Plane for the enterprise!
- Mazel tov Roi Abitboul and team Raven.io on coming out of stealth with $20M in seed funding to build real runtime protection for applications in the AI era!
- Good stuff Tomer Timor and team Niv-AI on raising a $12M seed round to improve GPU power efficiency!
- Congrats Limor S. Prigan and team LumenGuides on raising a $3.8M seed round to revolutionise Bronchoscopy!
EXITS
No new exits recorded this week, but the $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk by Palo Alto Networks has gone through regulatory approval.
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- Remagine Ventures ranked amongst Israel’s most active VCs in 2025 – I’m very proud of the fact that this happened during the war, the Israeli startup ecosystem is built differently.
- The global race for AI sovereignty: where does Israel stand? using Jensen Huang’s 5 layer model for AI, I summarised Israel’s efforts to become ‘AI independent’
- The web’s next customer isn’t human – Meta acquired Moltbook, the social network for agents, but the entire Internet is quickly being transformed for machine consumption.
ISRAEL
- The 2025 Investors report by IVC Data and Insights and Israel Innovation Authority – Israeli VC fundraising is recovering. Existing funds still hold $8.7B (Dry Powder) available for new and follow-on investments, while 29 funds are raising more than $1.1B.
- Israel currently ranks 1st globally in Anthropic’s AI Usage Index (AUI) – Anthropic released its global AI usage index, which ranks Israel #1 in the world, ahead of every major tech hub.
- Israeli startup Tenzai says its AI hacking agent beat 99% of 125K participants at six competitions, using tailored OpenAI and Anthropic models and costing $5K
- Bonus: The Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life, 2025
GLOBAL
- World Models: Computing the Uncomputable – a long essay by Packy McCormick on how World Models (AI that can simulate physics and environments instead of just predicting text) are the unlock for embodied AGI
- The collapse of terminal value – long post by Chamath Palihapitiya on what happens now that software has very little moats
- The category of ‘things worth funding’ is shrinking fast…
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israel currently ranks 1st globally in Anthropic’s AI Usage Index (AUI). Is the next wave of AI companies coming from Israel? ?? (credit: Visual Capitalist)
Despite the war, Israel ranked #8 in the World Happiness Report, and #3 for people younger than 25.
Investment in Israeli retail tech solutions jumped from $197 million in 2024 to $463 million in 2025, driven by AI enabled solutions. The re:tech Hub published a landscape of the 100 most promising Israeli retail-tech startups (source)
Remagine Ventures featured as one of the most active Venture funds in 2025 with 9 deals. (source)
All the AI-Native startups mentioned by Jensen Huang’s GTC 2026 keynote
Pre-seed investors expect startups to raise a seed round 6-12 months from funding, according to the preview snapshot of the pre-seed report by Fusion VC. That leads to investment focus on ‘high velocity’ startups (and hurts deep-tech)
The US healthcare industry is $4.9 trillion behemoth consuming nearly 20% of GDP, yet it remains a “digital laggard”. Nearly $1 trillion is annually devoured by administrative waste. Check out the the healthcare fintech map by Viola Ventures (source)
The 2026 European robotics startup landscape is growing. Great research by FOV Ventures (source)
50 startups transforming industries with physical AI. After decades of promise, autonomous systems and robotics are moving from labs to factory floors and households, powered by breakthroughs in AI and hardware. By Bessemer Venture Partners (source)
The location and path of the French aircraft carrier is visible to all thanks to a sailor using Strava to track his runs onboard. It’s not the first time Strava is used for surveillance.
What do people want from AI? We asked 81,000 of them on Claude. Mostly they want to be better at their jobs, better versions of themselves, and a little less overwhelmed. Study by Anthropic (source)
The collectibles industry market map (source)
That’s all for this week, thank you for tuning in. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating!
Stay safe! Shabbat shalom, Eid Mubarak and Norwuz Faruz to those who extend their hands for peace to Israel.
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 – March 20 2026 - March 20, 2026
- Remagine Ventures Ranked Among Israel’s Most Active VCs in 2025 - March 18, 2026
- The Global Race for AI Sovereignty: Where Does Israel Stand? - March 16, 2026
