It’s #Firgun time!
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If you’re new here, welcome! So glad you’ve joined 7,900 of us!
Firgun (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.
This week the Israel Innovation Authority published the draft of Israel’s national AI strategy (see links section below) to answer an important question: what does it take to remain strategically relevant in the AI era? Israel is already deeply immersed in AI and globally strong across key metrics (for example, it’s the number one user of Anthropic per capita), but staying ahead will require more deliberate government investment, stronger coordination with the National AI Directorate, and real input from founders, investors, researchers and the public sector. The opportunity is not to compete with the US and China on giant foundation models. It is to win where excellence matters more than scale: AI-native applications, AI infrastructure, physical AI, defence-adjacent technologies and strategic alliances.
In the wider tech world, Anthropic‘s Q1 revenue grew 80x year-over-year, with ARR now reportedly above $44 billion. The company is raising tens of billions of dollars at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. It signed a major compute deal with SpaceX, to lease all computing capacity at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center (more than 300 megawatts of AI compute powered by over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs. Also, Anthropic has reportedly committed to spending as much as $200 billion on Google’s cloud infrastructure and chips. Anthropic also announced higher Claude usage limits and ten ready-to-run financial services agent templates for pitchbooks, KYC and month-end close. OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.5 Instant, available to everyone. A new study showed that OpenAI’s o1 model beat hundreds of physicians on differential diagnosis, management planning, and real-time ER triage. The company finalised a $10 billion joint venture with PE firms for enterprise AI deployment venture backed by investors including TPG, Brookfield, Advent and Bain Capital, while Anthropic partnered with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs on a rival AI-native services company, showing that the next AI battleground is enterprise implementation, not just model quality. OpenAI also lost two senior leaders this week: Paul Zimmerman, NACD.DC, who left to join Google as head of private equity; and head of sales James Dyett, who moved to Thrive Capital. DeepSeek AI raised $2 billion from the Chinese government at a reported $50B Valuation. Another Chinese AI startup, Kimi (Moonshot AI), a three-year-old Beijing startup that develops open-weight large language models (Kimi), raised a $2 billion round at a $20 billion valuation. Kalshi, which operates a regulated prediction market, raised a $1 billion Series F round at a $22 billion post-money valuation, doubling its valuation in just five months. Sierra, the customer-experience AI startup founded by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, raised $950 million round at a valuation above $15 billion, and said it now serves over 40% of the Fortune 50. Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI signed agreements with the US Commerce’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation to allow pre-deployment national security testing of frontier AI models, making AI governance and model security part of the weekly news cycle. Microsoft published its 2026 Work Trend Index, arguing that the constraint is no longer what people can do with AI, but how organisations redesign work around people and agents. Google rolled out new AI-powered bidding and budgeting tools for Search and Shopping ahead of Google Marketing Live, as well as Fitbit AIR, a wearable competitive with WHOOP. NVIDIA deepened its AI infrastructure push with a reported plan to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN as part of a 5GW AI data centre deal. Coinbase is laying off about 700 employees or 14% of its workforce as part of a restructuring that includes flattening management layers and increasing reliance on AI tools.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Sun Tzu
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Big congrats Alon Dror, Hamutal Meridor and team Kela Technologies on securing a $200M series C at a $1.2 billion valuation to develop an operating system for modern militaries!
- Way to go Omer Kaplan and team ZyG on raising a $60M series A to build the first agentic Operating System for eCommerce DTC brands at scale!
- Kudos Atai Barkai and team CopilotKit on raising a $20.5M series A and previously undisclosed $6.5M seed to help developers build and deploy AI agents within applications!
- Well done Roei Zerahia and team MSICS Pharma on securing a $3.6M seed round to develop medical-grade psilocybin therapies for mental health conditions such as PTSD, depression, and OCD!
EXITS
- Big congrats Alon Jackson and team Astrix Security on the reported $350m-$400M acquisition by Cisco to protect enterprises from AI Agents and manage non human identities.
- Well done Idan Rotbart and team Buyverse (acquired by Keyz) on the acquisition by Keyz for an undisclosed sum!
NEW FUNDS
- Mazel tov Yaron Elad and Elik Etzion on the launch of AlphaDrive Ventures a new $100M fund focused on Israeli startups in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence!
- Congratulations Yaron Kniajer, Jared Kash and team Surround Ventures on the first closing of a $50M early stage fund focused on Israeli deep tech startups!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES / VC CAFE/ ISRAEL VC
- AI-Native Services: The New Startup Playbook – the next SaaS company won’t look like a software company. Small teams are now replacing accountancy offices, law firms, agencies, etc. Y Combinator Andreessen Horowitz all agree this is the next big trend.
- The Chokepoint Thesis: Moats, Affordance and Diffusion – taking inspiration from a book by Eddie Fishman, I looked at what are the chokepoints for startups, defensively and offensively and introduced Sequoia Capital Global Equities MAD framework.
- Israel’s 2026 National AI Strategy – my take on the official draft by Israel’s Innovation Authority. I agree with the premise: Israel needs to play on its strengths and not try to outspend the US or outscale China.
ISRAEL
- Strengthening the Global Leadership of Israeli High -Tech in the Age of AI: Where Excellence Outweighs Scale – Vision, Targets, and Operational Steps – by Israel Innovation Authority
- Shifting Sands: Israel’s Role as a Financial Capital in an Evolving Middle East – report by Jefferies
- Israeli startups raised over $1.25 billion in April, the strongest April since 2021, driven by Vast Data’s $1 billion round.
GLOBAL
- The 2026 AI Adoption Index by ICONIQ – Rather than prescribing a single definition of success, the goal is to create visibility into how AI is actually being adopted across the business, putting a stake in the ground on measurement, and separating signal from noise.
- The AI 100 – the most promising AI startup list by CB Insights A number of companies on this year’s AI 100 are deploying agents at scale that independently execute multi-step workflows without human sign-off on each step.
- One of Iran’s most powerful families founded its largest crypto exchange. It’s used by the IRGC to move millions – how crypto plays a role in geopolitics, money laundering and terror funding
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israel VC has been live for a week! We’ve made a huge amount of progress. Fund owners can now claim their fund profile page (and get a ‘verified’ badge for increased visibility) and founders can build their initial investor list for a round. Check out the updates at www.israelvc.com
The Israeli Industrial AI startup landscape created by Fay Goldstein was added to my 2026 Israeli startup landscape maps collection on VC Cafe (source)
The 5 years KPIs and pillars of the 2026 Israel National AI plan by the Israel Innovation Authority (source)
I’m very proud that Remagine Ventures was one of the ‘frequent investors’ in Israel, who completed at least 3 investments over the past 8-quarter period. Report by IVC Data and Insights
The AI 100 – the most promising AI startups according to CB Insights (source)
LLM enhanced messaging landscape by Menlo Ventures (source)
The open-source agent stack by Basis Set (source)
Thats’s all for this week. Thank you for tuning in! There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating!
Eze Vidra
