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.
The US-Iran ceasefire seems to have ended this week, raising questions about the implications for Israel. On the tech front, the H1 2026 reports are out and they are telling the story that’s been brewing over the past year or so – more capital concentrating around less companies. At the same time, the government is leaning further into industrial policy: from sovereign AI infrastructure and compute to new support measures aimed at keeping high-value R&D in Israel as the strong shekel increases local operating costs. Interesting nugget: Israeli tech has already produced more new unicorns in the first half of 2026 than in any full year on record.
In the wider tech world, OpenAI I broadly released its GPT-5.6 family, comprising the flagship Sol model and the cheaper Terra and Luna variants, alongside ChatGPT Work, a desktop agent that can draw context from tools including Slack, Gmail, Google Drive and CRM platforms to create documents, spreadsheets and applications. Meta launched Muse Image, the first image-generation model developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, across Meta AI, Instagram and WhatsApp, and previewed Muse Video, as the company seeks to translate its massive AI investment into consumer products and advertising tools. SpaceX AI and Cursor were preparing to release their first jointly developed AI model, after reportedly delaying the launch to improve its efficiency, while OpenAI Chief Futurist Joshua Achiam announced that he would leave the company after nearly nine years. Anthropic continued its expansion beyond coding through Claude Cowork and announced plans to double its New York workforce to approximately 1,000 employees, taking a 16-storey building in Lower Manhattan as the frontier-model companies compete for talent and enterprise customers. Microsoft t announced 4,800 job cuts, representing roughly 2.1% of its workforce, including a major restructuring of Xbox that will eliminate thousands of gaming roles and divest as many as five studios as the company shifts more capital and management attention toward AI. Meta also plans to begin production of its internally developed Iris AI chip in September, working with Broadcom and TSMC as it attempts to reduce its reliance on NVIDIA and double its computing capacity to 14GW by 2027. The scale of the infrastructure race continues to climb, with quarterly capital expenditure by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta estimated to have reached approximately $168 billion, up 74% year over year, as investors increasingly question when the unprecedented spending will translate into sustainable AI revenue and profits. In the chip market, SK hynix raised $26.5 billion through its Nasdaq debut, the largest US listing by a foreign company, after the offering was reportedly more than seven times oversubscribed, reflecting extraordinary demand for the high-bandwidth memory used in NVIDIA‘s AI systems. Micron Technology expanded its planned US investment to approximately $250 billion through 2035, covering memory manufacturing, advanced packaging and research, while Apple reportedly agreed to purchase more than $30 billion of US-made chips from Broadcom over five years. The mega-rounds also kept coming: SambaNova systems raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in a Series F, strengthening its challenge to NVIDIA in enterprise AI infrastructure; Blue Origin was reported to be raising $10 billion at a $130 billion pre-money valuation in what would be the space company’s first outside financing; distributed AI research platform Primeintellect raised $130 million at a $1 billion valuation; and AI-chip startup Positron AI entered talks to raise roughly $750 million as investors continued pouring capital into alternatives to the dominant GPU providers. The concentration is becoming increasingly stark: PitchBook data indicated that US venture investment reached approximately $413 billion in the first half of 2026, with AI companies attracting the overwhelming majority of the capital and seven startups completing rounds of at least $1 billion during the second quarter alone.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Imagine if Silicon Valley was a country… that’s what Israel is. An incredible density of talent, IP and IQ” – Bill Ackman
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NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Ido Bar-On and team Skapion on securing a $36M seed round to deliver a a native counter drone-swarm system designed specifically for simultaneous engagements!
- Congrats Tal Shoham and team Velocity on your $27M seed round to place ads in AI applications!
- Well done Stav Levi Neumark and team Alta | AI GTM System of Actions on your $25M series A to build the AI GTM architecture for revenue teams!
- Kudos Eyal Azoulay and team Tangos on coming out of stealth with $20M in seed funding to automate financial crime investigations!
- Way to go Ben Volkow and team QIZ Security on coming out of stealth with $17M in seed funding to expand your cryptographic posture and post-quantum security readiness!
EXITS
- Congrats Izhak Zimmermann and team Attribute – FinOps Without Tagging on the acquisition by DoiT for an undisclosed sum to provide real-time, kernel-level cloud shared cost attribution that doesn’t depend on anyone reporting anything!
- Well done Tomer Shiran and team Dremio on completing the acquisition by SAP for an undisclosed sum of your open, high-performance data lakehouse platform!
- Congrats Yoely Or and team Cando Drones on going public at the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange – ?????? ??????? ??? and raising $6.3M to develop and manufacture drones for dual use!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ ISRAEL VC/ REMAGINE VENTURES
- Every founder eventually looks for the exit sign – not all exits look like Wiz. For venture-backed startups, the path usually ends in one of three ways: IPO, acquisition or shutdown. But most acquisitions are not simple “success stories” or “failures.” They are a mix of timing, strategic fit, market consolidation, talent, leverage and preparation
- The Task Economy: Why AI’s Next Big Market May Be Human Work, Not Tokens – The first wave of AI was measured in tokens. The next wave may be measured in tasks: expert judgment, workflow completion, labelled data, compliance, payouts and human-in-the-loop quality control. For Israeli founders, this is not just another freelance marketplace. It is a new AI supply chain.
- We’ve made 15 investments with Remagine Ventures II already, but we’ve yet to tell our story…. With Fund 2, our aperture is much wider. We’re also spending real time in categories we previously didn’t cover: defence tech, hardware, quantum and other frontier areas where Israeli founders have an unfair advantage.
ISRAEL
- Israel tops global rankings for AI-native entrepreneurship – Report by AWS finds nearly one in three young Israeli startups is built around artificial intelligence, outpacing the United States and other leading technology hubs.
- How Israeli start-ups are helping ships navigate a contested Hormuz – Cheap Iranian drones and GPS jamming have choked the world’s most vital oil route. A handful of Israeli start-ups think they can help ships find a way through
- How Israeli tech is powering the world cup – interestingly, it’s more defence tech than sports tech!
GLOBAL
- US venture funding reached a record $412.7 billion in H1 2026 – PitchBook and NVCA data shows AI captured 86% of all US venture investment, while more than 81% of capital went into rounds of $100 million or more. A striking illustration of how concentrated the current boom has become.
- UK Innovation Update – H1 2026 – Dealroom.co and HSBC Innovation Banking found that UK startups raised $17.1 billion in the first half, with AI companies accounting for roughly three-quarters of the total. The UK remained Europe’s largest venture market, but domestic investors participated in only a small share of the biggest rounds
- Global startup investment reached a record $510 billion in H1 2026 – Crunchbase‘s half-year review shows global startup funding already exceeded the whole of 2025, alongside a recovery in venture-backed IPOs and acquisitions
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israeli tech has already produced more new unicorns in the first half of 2026 than in any full year on record. According to an IVC Data and Insights analysis, 16 Israeli tech companies reached unicorn status during H1/2026, with a combined first valuation of $25.3 billion.
Israel just ranked #1 in the world for AI-native startups. According to a new AWS study of 3,400+ founders across 20 countries, 31% of Israeli startups founded in the past five years are AI-native: ahead of the US (30%), France and Japan (28%). (source)
Nice find by a #FIRGUN newsletter reader, spotted on the Cyera jobs page :-)
Bessemer Venture Partners observes five frontiers that they think will define investing in AI infrastructure :1) Harness” infrastructure: memory, context, state, eval, and observability 2) Continual learning systems: models that keep learning post-deployment 3) Reinforcement learning platforms: environments, RL-as-a-service, and RL infra 4) The inference inflection point: production-scale serving and edge deployment 5) World models: AI that understands physical and spatial reality (source)
Europe’s most valuable AI startups
Goldman Sachs maps where $7.6 trillion in AI spending is going. Goldman Sachs expects AI capital spending to reach $765 billion in 2026 and grow to $1.6 trillion annually by 2031, totalling $7.6 trillion over six years.
Narrative violation – AI adoption is accelerating hiring: A new study of more than 21,000 U.S. companies found that businesses investing most heavily in AI increased their workforce by 10% over the past two years, while entry-level hiring rose 12%. The findings suggest AI is helping companies grow faster and create new roles rather than simply replacing existing jobs. (source)
An analysis of 8,799 rounds by Carta in H1 2026 shows that valuations have gotten higher, rounds have gotten bigger, but for fewer companies.
Topic density: Guy Fighel classified 558 of the 569 sessions at the AI Engineer World’s Fair and put a cross-cutting technique lens on top of the official tracks. The biggest cluster, roughly 1 in 5 sessions, is agentic SDLC: code review, self-driving codebases, harness engineering. And the recurring theme there is: (not model quality!) verification. Code review has become the tightest constraint in the whole system, to the point that “harness engineer” is now a real job title. (source)
Finally, Pershing Square Capital founder Bill Ackman, on why Israel is a good investment…
Thanks for tuning in. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on ceating!
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 – July 10 2026 - July 10, 2026
- The Task Economy: Why AI’s Next Big Market May Be Human Work, Not Tokens - July 8, 2026
- Every Founder Eventually Looks for the Exit Sign - July 7, 2026
