It’s #Firgun time!
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If you’re new here, welcome! So glad you’ve joined us.
Firgun (Hebrew: ??????, pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is an Israeli term describing genuine, unselfish joy in someone else’s success… It’s basically the opposite of “schadenfreude”. Every week since March 2020, we celebrate the wins of our startup community. Read more about why Firgun matters. If this was forwarded to you and you’d like to subscribe, previous editions are on VC Cafe.
The Q1 2026 tech review report was published this week, and Israeli startups raised $3.4 billion (despite much of that quarter being characterised by war), signalling a return to stability. One theme that emerges is that capital is increasingly concentrated, with 10% of deals securing over half of all funding, and cybersecurity/enterprise software dominating at 70% of investment. Furthermore, early-stage funding is rising as mid-stage activity remains suppressed, signalling a shift in growth-stage capital support.
In the wider tech world, Anthropic is in talks to raise a new $50 billion round at $900 billion valuation. It seeking investor commitments within 48 hours. Now thatMicrosoft and OpenAI rewrote their commercial terms, ending Microsoft’s exclusive cloud distribution rights and opening the door for OpenAI to sell through rival clouds such as Amazon and Google Cloud. OpenAI is partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and bringing OpenAI’s latest models and Codex to Amazon Bedrock in limited preview, alongside new OpenAI-powered agent tooling on AWS. Google Cloud used Next ’26 to launch its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Agentic Data Cloud, and new 8th-generation TPUs, while also starting preview rollout for Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Microsoft also landed its biggest Microsoft Copilot deployment yet, rolling it out to roughly 743,000 Accenture employees. On funding, UK startup Ineffable Intelligence increased its round size to $1.1 billion in what Reuters described as Europe’s largest seed round, with backing from Sequoia, Lightspeed, Nvidia, Google, and the British government. Netomi raised $110 million from Accenture Ventures and others as AI customer service keeps attracting serious capital. On M&A, China blocked Meta’s acquisition of AI agent startup Manus AI, a reminder that geopolitics is now shaping the agent race too. And the hyperscaler capex war only got louder, with Reuters reporting that Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are now on track to spend more than $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026, while Meta lifted capex guidance to $125 billion-$145 billion and then raised $25 billion in bonds. ElevenLabs launched ElevenMusic, a streaming platform with built-in AI remixing and AI-assisted track creation, already hosting 4k+ artists and offering creator payouts
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Antisemitism is about the inability of a group to make space for difference. And because we are all different, the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.” – Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Elad Walach and team Aidoc on your impressive $150 million in Series E round to scale your clinical AI platform across global healthcare networks!
- Good luck Nohik Semel and team Altair Semiconductor on spinning off from Sony Semicon (EU) with $50M in funding to develop cellular chipsets used widely in smart meters and other connected devices!
- Well done Tal David and team Quantum Art on extending your Series A by $40 million to $140 million total
- Mabruk Snir Kodesh and team Petual on your $17M series A and previously undisclosed $3.2M seed round to bring agentic AI to SOX testing and internal audit, autonomously!
- Kudos Roy Daniel and team Definity on securing a $12M series A to manage enterprise data pipelines with AI!
- Way to go Oshri Cohen and team Cybord on your $7M series A extension to develop Visual AI for electronic component inspection and supply chain resilience!
EXITS
- Way to go Ido Sofer and team Sodot on the acquisition by MoonPay for a reported $100M to leverage your encryption tech to power MoonPay’s new institutional offering!
- Well done Donny Greenberg and team Runhouse on the acquisition by Anthropic for an undisclosed sum!
- Congrats Raz Rotenberg and team Fabrix Security (Acquired by Silverfort) on the acquisition by Silverfort for an estimated tens of millions for your AI agents for identity security, empowering IAM teams with the intelligence to make confident, explainable access decisions!
APPOINTMENTS
- Kudos Yoni Greifman on being appointed as the newst partner at Qumra Capital!
NEW FUNDS
- Big congrats Talia Rafaeli and Sebastian Peck on announcing KOMPAS VC fund II, a €160 million ($187.5 million) fund focused on startups tackling the “physical world”: decarbonization, manufacturing, supply chains, and critical infrastructure in Israel and Europe.
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- The Sasspocalypse is more hype than obituary – the reports on the death of SaaS are slightly market hysteria – I list the limitation with Agentic AI coding and vibe coding and where the opportunities for startups are.
- Requests for startups Summer 2026 edition – I’ve been tracking requests for startups lists since 2024 as a barometer for VC herd mentality. Check out the latest from Y Combinator, a16z speedrun and ARK Investment Management LLC
- How AI’s impact on software is pushing VCs from Bits to Atoms – since anyone can code, software moats are disappearing and suddenly robotics, hardware and physical AI look more attractive categories for investors.
ISRAEL
- I’m proud to share a new resource for the Israeli startup community – Israel VC. I’ve owned the domain israelvc.com since 2007. IsraelVC is a clean, curated directory of venture capital funds investing in Israeli startups. The goal is simple: make the Israeli venture ecosystem easier to navigate for founders, investors, and anyone tracking the market. More on Why I built it
- Q1 2026 tech review by IVC Data and Insights and LeumiTech – Alongside market activity, the report offers a broader view of Israeli tech, covering employment and salary trends, structural shifts in the industry, the dominance of sectors such as cybersecurity and AI, capital concentration, and investor activity patterns.
- Israel’s economy and financial markets are booming even as conflict rages in the Middle East – overview of Israeli economic performance by CNBC
GLOBAL
- Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta plan to spend a combined $725 billion on AI infrastructure this year, up 77% from $410 billion in 2025 by Financial Times
- A new study finds roughly a third of websites created since 2022 are AI-generated. “We’re witnessing, in my opinion, a major transformation of the digital landscape in a fraction of the time it took to build in the first place,” concluded Jonáš Doležal, an AI researcher at Stanford and co-author of the paper. By 404 Media
- The Vertical Report 2026 Full Version – Euclid’s annual analysis of 4K+ financings, 250+ exits, and the major trends in Vertical AI
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Please check out my latest launch, www.israelvc.com and subscribe to the newsletter updates.
Q1 2026 tech review summary by IVC Data and Insights (source)
Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett merged parties and now Polymarket give the duo an increasing chance to win the election.
Tel Aviv University is amongst the top Universities creating startup founders (source)
Top subsectors in AI according to capital invested, by PitchBook (source)
The latest “RFS” by YC – see more on my Requests for startups summer 2026 edition
What topics are people most fed-up with at X? according to Nikita Bier
Who are the leading CVCs in Europe?
That’s all for this week. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!
Eze Vidra
He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.
He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – May 1, 2026 - May 1, 2026
- Hello world: Why I built IsraelVC - April 30, 2026
- How AI’s impact on software is pushing VCs from Bits to Atoms - April 29, 2026