It’s #Firgun time!
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In case you’re new here, the word “Firgun” (pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is an informal modern Hebrew term and concept in Israeli culture (originally Yiddish), which describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other person. It’s the opposite of “schadenfreude” (which stands for being happy for someone else’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for members of our community’s accomplishments, good fortune and wins. More about the concept of Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p. In November #FIRGUN officially celebrated 5 years. See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going. Next milestone: 21 years to VC Cafe in December! Time flies when you’re having fun.
You may have noticed that the #FIRGUN image changed from #BRINGTHEMHOME to #BRINGHIMHOME. That’s because the body of Ran Gvili is the last one that has yet to be returned. We should not leave anyone behind.
Israeli startups raised over $1.4 billion across 28 deals in November alone. It’s great news of course, but that’s if you are operating in Cybersecurity and AI, which attracted most of the funding. The diversity of fields has reduced, as you can see in the first image in the media section below. Israeli startup exits in 2025 have already exceeded $70 billion (largely driven by Wiz and CyberArk).
In the wider tech world, Cloudflare was down again today, hitting big parts of the Internet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominated the news cycle at re:Invent 2025 (link to everything that was announced), officially entering the foundational model wars with the launch of its Amazon Nova family (Nova 2, Lite, and Sonic) and the Nova Forge service for custom model training. Doubling down on infrastructure, AWS also unveiled its next-gen Trainium3 chips to power a new wave of autonomous “frontier agents.” In the generative media arena. Runway claimed a “David vs. Goliath” victory with the launch of Gen 4.5, a video model reportedly outperforming rivals from Google and OpenAI. China’s Kling AI also unveiled the Kling O1 image model, enabling seamless end-to-end workflows from basic image generation to advanced detail editing. Meanwhile, OpenAI has declared an internal “Code Red” to accelerate GPT-5 development as Google continues to gain rapid ground in the enterprise sector since the launch of Gemini-3. I think it’s justified – I find myself using more and more Google tools like Nano Banana and NoteookLM and less ChatGPT. Anthropic hired advisors to prepare for a possible IPO in 2026. China’s DeepSeek launched two new models to push the frontier of AI research forward. Bending Spoons continued to consolidate internet darlings with the acquisition of Eventbrite for $500M. Who will be next? Kalshi , the largest U.S. predictions marketplace, raised $1b at an $11b valuation. It turns out that Suno creates the equivalent of the entire Spotify music catalogue EVERY TWO WEEKS. Apple is making an overhaul of its AI team, as John Giannandrea is stepping down. Finally, an interesting take about the impact of vibe coding on SaaS by Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot – tl:dr vibe coding is great for prototyping but won’t replace SaaS soon.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.” – Nikola Tesla
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congrats Ofir Ehrlich and team Eon.io on securing a $300M series D at $4 billion valuation for your one-year old cloud backup automation platform! ?
- Mazel tov Amnon Shashua and team AAI Technologies (double AI) on the $200M and new unicorn statuus to develop AI agents and expert language models (in stealth) ?
- Kudos Lior Div and team 7AI on raising a $130M series A 10 months after coming out of stealth, to decrease the reponse time to cyber threats from days to seconds!
- Way to go Bentzion Levinson and team Heven AeroTech on the new $100M series B and new unicorn status on your hydrogen-powered UAS! ?
- Well done Sanaz Yashar and team Zafran Security on your $60M series C (at double the valuation) for your AI native threat exposure management platform
- Impressive news Noam Awadish and team imper.ai on coming out of stealth with a $28M series A to stop AI driven deepfake attacks!
- Mabruk Omri Iluz and team Lumia Security on coming out of stealth with an $18M seed round to provide network-level visibility and policy enforcement across thousands of AI applications!
- Awesome news Hilla Haddad Chmelnik and team Moonshot Space on coming out of stealth with a $12M funding round to build a new space electromagnetic launch system!
- Kol hakavod Ziv Levi and team LeanCon on securing a new $6M seed round to accelerate AI-driven pre-construction planning!
- Excited for you Nir Weingarten and team Eikona on raising a $5M seed round to build a new GenAI framework for customer newsletter communication!
EXITS
- Kudos Tomy Schoenfeld and team yad2 on the acquisition of your Israeli classifies platform for $950M by Apax!
- Way to go Ruth Poliakine Baruchi and team MyndYou on the acquisition by WindRose Health Investors estimated at tens of millions!
- Congrats Ran Oelgiesser and team RightBound on the acquisition by Gong for an undisclosed sum!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
- I got a lot of positive feedback this week on my post A note to founders in stealth mode – describing what pre-seed VCs are looking for in a startup
- It’s never been easier to ship an MVP, but at the same time it’s hard to capture users attention. That’s why I wrote – Shortening the Time to WOW (TtW) in AI products – a way to think about your FTUE (first time user experience)
- ICYMI – we announced our new $25M fund to invest invest in Israeli pre-seed startups and we shared a new website for Remagine Ventures including resources for founders: create a one pager and ‘office hours’ where you can ask us anything – check it out! https://www.remagineventures.com
ISRAEL
- Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp on defending Israel: “Most of the critiques of Israel, not all, are people who have Israel or Jewish derangement syndrome. They’re like hobbyists. They think about Jews all day. I grew up in the Jewish community, I don’t think about Jews very often.” – source
- Lessons from a Defense Tech Week conference in Tel Aviv by Amir Mizroch
- Israeli exits surpass $70 billion and funding to exceed $12 billion in 2025 – by CTech by Calcalist – New data highlights a sharp rise in domestic buyers and a rebound in capital raising expected to surpass $12 billion
GLOBAL
- China leapfrogs US in market for ‘open’ AI models by The Financial Times – a recent report from MIT and Hugging Face found that China has now overtaken the US in ‘open’ AI model downloads. Related: my post on how Why Open Source AI From China Is Eating Silicon Valley’s Lunch
- “State of Enterprise Tech Spending report ” by Battery Ventures – Based on a survey of 100 CXOs representing $35B in annual tech spend, the report reveals a clear acceleration in enterprise AI spend and maturity
- Build What’s Fundable: YC’s Formula For Startup Manufacturing – interesting critique by Kyle Harrison on the ‘startup factories’ like Y Combinator
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The Israeli tech industry is becoming less diverse as cyber and AI lead the funding by a margin according to IVC Data and Insights
- Capital raising: non-AI/Cyber companies dropped from 39% of all capital in 2021 to 15% in 2025.
- Exits: their share of exit proceeds fell from 52% to 16%, while AI and Cyber now dominate liquidity.
- New companies: their share fell from 56% of all new startups in 2021 to 38% in 2025.
2025 edition of the Global Talent Competitive Index by INSEAD places Israel in the 23rd spot overall – it has top scores for talent, but went down in overall ranking due to political instability (source)
The Israeli Insurtech landscape was added to my 2025 Israeli Startup Landscape Collection on VC Cafe (source)
The impact of AI on Saas – From the recent “State of Enterprise Tech Spending report ” by Battery (source)
The AI powered finance automation stack by Inovia Capital was added to my Reddit, Inc. community r/startuplandscapes (source)
The impact of AI on public markets – these are the top 10 companies by market cap (source)
Domains of AI Agents in Marketing – interesting landscape by chiefmartec (source)
Founder ownership report 2025 by Carta (based on mainly US data) on how much equity startups sell per round. The median amounts don’t fully show that there’s a huge range. (source)
The Accel 2025 globalscape report, the top AI companies worth less than $1 billion in the US (source)
The European startups changing the future of e-commerce by Dawn Capital (source)
The mobile games UA ecosystem and tech stack by Shanny Keidar Goldschmid (source)
AI Slop Report: The Global Rise of Low-Quality AI Videos by Kapwing (source)
There are 221 million subscribers to Ai slop channels
The thinking game – documentary about Google DeepMind founder and Google head of AI Demis Hassabis
Fun fact: ChatGPT ‘only’ launched 30 years ago this week. How much has changed since….
That’s all for this week. Thanks for tuning in. There’s a lot to celerate 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.
