Key takeaways
- Alice’s $140 million round confirms that AI model and agent security is becoming a major enterprise category.
- Israeli companies were active acquirers, with Nayax’s $350 million IPS Group deal alongside acquisitions by CropX and Echo.
- Capital continues to concentrate around AI infrastructure, security and physical AI, led by Nvidia, Anthropic and several large robotics rounds.
It’s #Firgun time!
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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.
It’s a back to school edition (nearly there, parents!) and it’s very quiet on the funding front, at least on the surface. The new school year begins on September 1 against a difficult backdrop: almost 90% of Israeli parents believe the war with Iran harmed their children’s education, and the system continues to face substantial teacher shortages. Regionally, tensions with Turkey are also rising. The two countries increasingly find themselves on opposing sides in Syria, where Israel is concerned about Turkey’s expanding military presence, while Ankara is seeking an Interpol notice against Prime Minister Netanyahu.
In the wider tech world, NVIDIA reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, potentially combining the dominant AI-compute provider with the leading platform for discovering and distributing open-source models. NVIDIA also reported quarterly revenue of $96.2 billion and expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy another two million GPUs by 2028. Anthropic signed a roughly $45 billion, six-year compute deal with @Nscale for 460 megawatts of Nvidia Vera Rubin capacity as it races towards a potential IPO at a valuation reportedly as high as $2 trillion, while its reported $7 billion acquisition talks with Decart could become considerably more valuable if the transaction is mostly paid in Anthropic shares. OpenAI introduced its Jalapeño inference chip, expanded its Daybreak cyber-defence service and invested approximately $400 million in a second startup fund, while Google rolled out Ask Gemini in Google Chat and launched new AI video and speech models. Salesforce expanded its partnership with Anthropic through Claudeforce, helping its shares jump more than 22% following stronger-than-expected results. In China, DeepSeek is reportedly preparing to raise $7.4 billion at a $74 billion valuation, Alibaba Cloud released Qwen3.8-Flash and Moonshot AI open-sourced its 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model. Physical AI continued attracting large checks as Generalist added $200 million at a $3 billion valuation, @Gatik raised $200 million and SoftBank Investment Advisers reportedly entered talks to acquire a majority stake in humanoid-robotics company 1X at a $6 billion valuation. Elsewhere, Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk after 21 years, Apple unveiled its M6 Mac mini, @Rockstar Games suffered a major leak of GTA VI material, and cybersecurity stocks surged following strong results from CrowdStrike and Okta . Finally, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over ten years to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children, introducing time limits, nighttime curfews and new algorithmic controls for teenage users.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
Alvin Toffler
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NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congratulations to Noam Schwartz and the Alice (Formerly ActiveFence) team on raising $140 million series C to test, monitor and protect AI models and agents!
- Congrats Jonathan Jaglom and team fl? Optics on securing an undisclosed investment from Mitsui & Co., Ltd. for your proprietary digital lens coating technologies!
EXITS
- Well done to Eilon Elhadad and the Echo team on acquiring the technology and customer operations of Minimus (acquired by Echo) which shut down earlier this week.
- Congrats Assaf Carmi and team SCIO on the acquisition by CropX of your portable spectroscopy technology for an undisclosed sum.
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE/ ISRAEL VC
- The Israeli Startup’s US Playbook – Entering the US requires more than an office and a local salesperson. Israeli startups need a focused commercial beachhead, sustained founder involvement, the right first hire and a repeatable land-and-expand motion.
- AI Is Making Israeli EdTech Investable Again – Personalised tutors, adaptive learning and experienced Israeli founders are bringing new energy to a category that venture investors largely ignored during the SaaS boom.
- What the Nvidia acquisition of Hugging Face means for future M&A and why owning the distribution is becoming critical for AI companies
ISRAEL
- Nvidia’s Israeli networking operation reaches record revenue – Mellanox-derived networking technology is becoming an increasingly important part of Nvidia’s data-centre business.
- As AI hits software sector, defense-tech flourishes – A report by Israeli recruiting firm GotFriends finds that while software firms are adjusting to AI with layoffs, defense-tech job vacancies are up 20% while salaries are comparable with other tech sectors.
- Insight Partners: “The adaptability that characterizes Israeli founders remains an advantage” – We’ve observed incredible resilience in these teams and an ability to execute consistently regardless of regional conditions, which factors meaningfully into how we think about risk, says Teddie Wardi
GLOBAL
- You are not a model. Don’t price per token – Charging per token is becoming the default for AI companies. For most AI applications, it is a mistake. Research by Andreessen Horowitz
- The state of the AI economy – Exponential View reconstructed the AI economy from the bottom up, capturing every real dollar of customer demand, no double-counting.
- Inside OpenAI’s Reboot – Long form read on OpenAI by TIME interviews Sam Altman and discusses the senior exec departures, security issues, getting it wrong, etc. Worth a read!
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
A new IVC analysis shows that 57.9% of the capital raised by Israeli tech companies in H1/2026 went to companies headquartered outside Israel, compared with 48.9% in 2016. The foreign HQ share fell below 50% several times during the past decade and peaked at 67.4% in 2024. Since 2019, however, foreign-headquartered companies have captured more than half of total funding in five of the eight periods measured. Data by IVC Data and Insights
The State of AI in 2026: On the Road to ROI – McKinsey & Company finds that agent adoption is rising, particularly among large enterprises, but individual productivity gains are still not translating consistently into company-level performance.
The creator economy tech stack by Apples to Apples (source)
Ycombinator released their latest ‘request for startups’ – it’s been added to my Fall 2026 RFS collection on VC Cafe (source)
The OpenAI mafia is on course to surpass $2TR in value (source) – Ilya Sutskever, Mira Murati, Dario Amodei etc…
The Humanoid robot supply chain by Goldman Sachs
The Disaster Risk Reduction landscape by Top Tier Impact
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 – August 28 2026 - August 28, 2026
- The Israeli Startup’s US Playbook - August 26, 2026
- AI Is Making Israeli EdTech Investable Again, and Experienced Founders Are Beginning to Notice - August 25, 2026
