Key takeaways
- Israeli tech recorded more than $670 million in announced exits, led by Munich Re’s $575 million acquisition of At-Bay.
- AI capital is moving beyond chatbots into chips, data centres, video, robotics, defence and other physical infrastructure.
- As autonomous agents become more capable, AI governance, security and containment are becoming board-level responsibilities.
It’s #Firgun time!
The original version of this newsletter was published on LinkedIn to 8,350+ subscribers. Sign up to get to get the next one in your inbox.
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.
We’re approaching the end of August and it continues to be quiet on the funding front, but red hot when it comes to exits. Munich Re agreed to acquire At-Bay for $575 million, backing the convergence of cyber insurance and continuous risk prevention. DoiT acquired Attribute for an estimated $65 million, adding visibility into the rapidly growing cost of AI tokens, agents and cloud infrastructure. Ondas continued assembling an Israeli defence technology platform with its $33 million acquisition of Aran Defense
In the wider tech world, Anthropic dominated headlines as its annual revenue run rate reportedly reached $65 billion (up from $9B at the end of 2025) and banks competed to provide a pre-IPO credit facility of more than $10 billion. OpenAI, meanwhile, slowed parts of its model development after an experimental agent hacked Hugging Face during testing. New product launch: ChatGPT for Teens, introduces additional guardrails, parental controls and restrictions around high-risk topics. The infrastructure race showed no signs of cooling: Google struck a custom AI chip agreement with Marvell Technology worth up to approximately $12 billion, Broadcom reportedly sought more than $60 billion in debt to finance new AI projects, and Meta emerged as one of Microsoft’s largest AI customers, reportedly spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on models hosted through Azure while developing competing models of its own. Etched raised $700 million at a $21 billion valuation, more than doubling its valuation in less than a month, while Callosum raised a $100 million seed round to route AI workloads across different chips and computing environments. The AI video race also accelerated as Higgsfield AI raised $400 million at a $5.4 billion valuation, quadrupling its valuation as annualised revenue reached $700 million. Warp launched Warp Factories to help companies deploy fleets of coding agents, Cursor launched Origin, an agent-native challenger to GitHub , and Cognition denied reports of acquisition talks with SpaceX as it reportedly explores funding at a $40 billion valuation. Beyond software, physical AI companies attracted $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, confirming that this cycle’s mega-rounds are no longer just about chatbots. Capital is rapidly moving into chips, data centres, video, robotics, defence and the physical infrastructure required to deploy AI at scale.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” ? Harlan Ellison
12 Months Free Subscription + 600 Hours of AI Voice for Israeli Startups
Israeli founders interested to build with voice AI, our partners at HubSpot for Startup have teamed up with ElevenLabs get you 12 months free on the Scale Plan, including 33 million characters of output, roughly 600 hours of AI-generated audio.
That’s enough runway to build a voice tutor, launch an AI support agent, prototype a conversational product, or test voice as part of your product without worrying about usage costs from day one.
Who’s eligible? The grant is available to startups with:
- A full-time founder
- Fewer than 25 employees
- A HubSpot for Startups Member
There’s one grant available per company.
How to claim it
Step 1: Request access to the offer here.
Step 2: Join HubSpot for Startups here.
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Big congrats to David Twizer and the xpander.ai team on raising a $4.4M million seed extension (bringing your total seed round to $7.5M) to help enterprises build, deploy and manage AI agents across different models, clouds and development frameworks without rebuilding their infrastructure.
- Kudos Itamar Meyer and team Colllab on coming out of stealth with a $855K pre-seed round to automate word of mouth for freelancers!
EXITS
- Congratulations to Rotem Iram and the At-Bay team on the company’s $575 million acquisition by Munich Re to combine cyber insurance with continuous security monitoring, serving more than 35,000 businesses.
- Kudos to Izhak Zimmermann , Liad Tropp and the Attribute team on the acquisition by DoiT for an estimated $65 million to give companies visibility into spending on AI tokens, models and cloud resources at the level of individual products, teams, agents and customers.
- Well done Tal Laufer and the Aran Group team on the $33 million acquisition by Ondas Autonomous Systems. The transaction adds Israeli engineering and manufacturing capabilities to Ondas’s growing portfolio of autonomous defence systems.
NEW FUNDS
- Kudos Gur Talpaz and team Cognition Venture Partners on announcing a new early stage fund focused on cybersecurity targeting $170m in size. You have a brand new profile on Israel VC!
APPOINTMENTS
- Big congrats Nati Amsterdam on being appointed as head of Microsoft Israel!
- Well done Lior Noy on bering appointed head of Israel for LinkedIn!
- Kudos Assaf (Assi) Horowitz on being appointed Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Israel Innovation Authority!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES/ ISRAELVC
- AI Watermarks and the Trust Layer – AI watermarking is becoming a trust layer for the synthetic web. As regulation pushes providers toward machine-readable provenance, leading AI companies are combining invisible signals, visible labels and C2PA metadata. These systems are imperfect, but they can make AI-generated content more accountable and deception more costly.
- Your next cyber threat may apply for a job – What ANY.RUN’s investigation into North Korean IT workers teaches founders about hiring, access and trust
- AI Musical Chairs – Frontier AI labs are raising billions on the strength of elite teams, expensive compute and the promise of AGI, often before proving product-market fit or revenue. As founders and researchers move rapidly between rival labs, investors must ask whether they are funding durable companies or temporary collections of highly portable talent.
- The AI Didn’t Go Rogue. It Followed the Goal. – When an autonomous agent escaped a cyber test and broke into Hugging Face, it exposed a security model built for humans, not machines
- The Data Centre Is Escaping the Building – AI may live in the cloud, but the cloud is running out of places to live. As power, water, land and regulation constrain traditional data centres, compute is moving into containers, converted warehouses, power stations, ships and even orbit.
MISCELLANEOUS
- Big congrats to Remagine Ventures venture partner Etan Ilfeld on making history: hosting the The 30th Mind Sports Olympiad and bringing the Backgammon World Championships to the UK for the first time. (Earls Court, 22–30 August). Anyone can compete, and spectating is free.
- After his daughter’s brain hemorrhage, Bill Ackman commits $400 million to brain research – Bill Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman, are committing approximately $400 million to establish a new nonprofit institute focused on brain research. The billionaire investor says his daughter Lucy’s recovery convinced him that medicine and technology can do more for patients with catastrophic brain injuries. His new nonprofit will focus on rehabilitation, neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces and longevity.
ISRAEL
- AI is splitting Israel’s high-tech industry in two – Software companies are cutting jobs and slowing hiring while demand for chips, computing infrastructure and deep tech is driving expansion elsewhere in the sector.
- Decart’s founders could retain 64% of the company ahead of the reported Anthropic acquisition A useful look at the ownership, founders and potential returns behind the rumoured deal.
- SoftBank appoints Yossi Cohen as strategic adviser The former Mossad chief moves into a more senior global role closer to Masayoshi Son after previously leading SoftBank’s Israeli activity.
GLOBAL
- The next billion dollar startups 2026 – editorial selection of future unicorns by Forbes
- California attracted approximately $366 billion in venture capital in 2026, more than the other 49 US states combined, driven overwhelmingly by AI megadeals.
- What every CEO needs to know about AI governance Bessemer Venture Partners frames AI governance as a fiduciary responsibility and offers a seven-point checklist for boards and management teams.Bessemer Venture Partners | August 19
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Where did VCs place bets in Israeli tech in H1 2026? The latest chart by IVC Data and Insights confirms: AI and Cyber dominate while everyone else fights for scraps.
The AI tech stack landscape by Picus Capital – from energy, chips, and hyperscalers, all the way up to the adjacent enablers and applications (source)
The physical AI infrastructure landscape by Remarkable Ventures Climate (source)
The data centre is escaping the building – from my latest post on VC Cafe about the new data centre models getting funded to match demand (source)
The rare earths and minerals landscape by Collide Capital
There are no moats…
VCs poured $47.4 billion into physical AI in H1 2026 across 521 deals, according to Crunchbase.
Own Your Intelligence: A How-To Guide Sequoia Capital argues that AI companies need to own and compound the intelligence created through their products rather than becoming thin interfaces over external models.
Do you suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?? (source @tbc media)
There’s been a bunch of people posting how the LLMs describe them in one word. I thought Claude’s reply was funny.
That’s all for this week! Keep on creating. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community!
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 – August 21 2026 - August 21, 2026
- The Data Centre Is Escaping the Building - August 20, 2026
- The AI Didn’t Go Rogue. It Followed the Goal. - August 19, 2026
