It’s #Firgun time!
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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.
Today we celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, representing the harvest and the giving of the Torah. I want to start by congratulating Noam Bettan, who won 2nd place in Eurovision with his song “Michelle”, and made the whole country and diaspora proud in light of boycotts, protests and boos from the crowd. To mentally prepare, he trained in Israel with people heckling and booing him. Think about that. This week once again demonstrated the resilience and momentum of the Israeli tech ecosystem. Elon Musk made headlines after calling Israel “number one in the world by far in innovation per capita” during the Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv, reinforcing the global perception of Israel as a disproportionate force in AI, mobility, cyber, defense and deeptech.
In the wider tech world, A historic mega-IPO season has officially arrived as SpaceX filed its S-1 prospectus for what is expected to be the largest public offering in history, at $1.5 trillion. It is closely followed by OpenAI, which cleared a massive legal hurdle to solidify its own imminent fall IPO after a California jury took under two hours to unanimously dismiss Elon Musk’s high-profile breach-of-contract lawsuit against Sam Altman. Anthropic is experiencing such explosive enterprise growth that it expects to turn its first-ever operating profit of $559 million in Q2 on $10.9 billion in revenue, tracking faster than Google or Facebook did before their own public listings, reinforcing the narrative that foundation model companies are rapidly evolving from pure infrastructure providers into full-stack enterprise software businesses. Google continued their aggressive AI product rollouts at Google I/O 2026, introducing new models and devices and making the biggest change to Google search since its inception. NVIDIA deepened its infrastructure dominance with a $2.1 billion data centre expansion deal.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Innovation per capita, Israel must be number one by far in the world.”
Elon Musk
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congrats Dean Leitersdorf and team Decart on securing a $300M series C at a reported $4 billion valuation to extend your AI platform into world models and physical AI!
- Kudos Shay Levi and team Unframe on your $50M Series B after surpassing $100M in contracts within a year, powering the transition to AI for enterprise software!
- Well done Shimon Elkabetz and team Tomorrow.io on your $35M extension bringing your series F to $210M to build the world’s leading Resilience Platform!
- Way to go Shay Shwartz ? and team Ocean on your $20M series A to stop email cyber attacks!
- Big thumbs up Gavriel Cohen the team at NanoCo (creators of NanoClaw) on securing $12M in Seed funding to build enterprise AI agents!
- Mazel tov Yoav Kolodner and team Tribal your $10M seed round to build an enterprise AI agent platform into complex organisational environments!
- Mabruk Moti Cohen and team Viewz on your $7M seed round for your AI-native financial operations platform and unified ledger startup!
- Mabruk Daniel Zahavi and team Arito on securing a $6M seed round to develop AI tools for finance teams!
EXITS
- Great stuff Ofer Yarden and team Omnisys on the $200M acquisition by Ondas Inc. for your battlefield real time information platform!
- Kudos Kevin Mayberry and team Endospan Ltd. on the acquisition by Artivion, Inc. for a reported $135M for your NEXUS aortic arch stent graft system!
- Way to go Shai Horovitz and team Jit on the acquisition by Torq for a reported $70M in an all-Israeli cyber deal!
- Big congrats to Nadav Noy, Noam Dotan and the team at Genie Security on the acquisition by cyber unicorn Cyera for an estimated $50M (5 months from launch!) to strengthen AI-powered endpoint data security and data loss prevention!
- Well done Philip Tannor, Shir Chorev and team Deepchecks on the acquisition by Check Point Software for an undisclosed sum (estimated at $10M-$20M)
- Mabruk On Freund and team Wilco on the acqui-hire by Lemonade for an undisclosed sum.
NEW FUNDS
- Congratulations Pat Gelsinger, Peter Barrett and team Playground Global your fourth deep tech fund at $475 million, targeting foundational advances across next-generation compute architectures, materials, and physical infrastructure, including in Israel! Your new fund profile was added to Israel VC!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES/ ISRAELVC
- Why founders are embracing open source again – Open source can create momentum and adoption, but it also introduces a set of risks founders should not underestimate
- Decart AI’s $300M Round Is a Positive Signal for Israeli AI – Decart AI is building infrastructure for the next generation of real-time AI systems: software that helps models run faster, cheaper and more efficiently across different chips and cloud environments.
- From Renting Infrastructure to Selling Solutions: Why AI Model Companies Are Moving Up the Stack – Something important is happening in AI, and it is still not talked about enough: the model companies are moving from renting infrastructure to selling solutions.
- The Rare Earth Renaissance: 2026 Deeptech Allocation – Software may be eating the world, but the physical infrastructure of the 21st century (from generative AI data centers to autonomous defense systems) still runs on rocks.
ISRAEL
- Wide ranging conversation between two OGs of Israeli venture – oren zeev and Michael Eisenberg
- Hatred of Israel and the Degradation of the West – an op-ed in The New York Times highlighting ongoing global discourse on whether intense focus on Israel reflects reasoned judgment or broader Western cultural decline
- Demand soars for Israel’s weapons tech, even among countries claiming to boycott Jewish state by The Times of Israel
GLOBAL
- Inside the biggest bet in corporate history – the unprecedented spend on AI infrastructure by the hyperscalers could make this period the largest greenfield money-making opportunity in history – by Byron Deeter / Bessemer Venture Partners
- CNBC disruptor 50 list – The list recognizes private, companies that are challenging existing industries and building new ones – by CNBC
- Startup Defensibility Report Card – by Patrick Salyer at Mayfield. Evaluates any AI agent startup’s defensibility against Claude, OpenAI, etc.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israel ranks 3rd globally in papers accepted to [ICML] Int’l Conference on Machine Learning, NeurIPS and ICLR (per 1M population) (source)
Q1 2026 highlights created by Israel VC from the Israeli tech Q1 2026 report by Startup Nation Central
First-time Investments in Israeli Tech hit a historic low – A new analysis from the Q1/2026 Israeli Tech Review by IVC Data and Insights and LeumiTech shows that the share of first-time investments declined to 30%–38% across investor groups. At the same time, startup formation in Israel has recently shown signs of recovery. The result is a growing mismatch between the number of new ventures entering the market and investors’ willingness to back them.
The AI data center stack by Bessemer Venture Partners (source)
LLM enhanced messaging market map by Menlo Ventures (source)
AI short dramas landscape by Justine Moore (source)
Anthropic hits profitability for the first time in Q2 2026
The slow decay of growth (and how to avoid it). New data + real examples from companies that bent the growth curve back up (source)
Michelle by Noam Bettan, official clip
That’s all for this week. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!
Chag sameach,
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.
