It’s #Firgun time!
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.
I spent just over 48 hours in Israel this week. It was a whirlwind trip: speaking at the GameIS conference, meeting founders, catching up with portfolio companies and seeing firsthand the energy that continues to define the ecosystem. But stepping away from the headlines, I came back optimistic. The founders I met are building through the noise, and global investors continue to recognise Israel’s strengths. This week, Bank of America once again ranked Israel among the world’s leading AI hubs outside the US and China, citing its talent, innovation ecosystem and long-term potential.
In the wider tech world, Stripe and private equity giant Advent International joined forces to launch an unsolicited, blockbuster $53 billion takeover bid to buy PayPal and take the payments pioneer private. This massive proposal comes amid widening software sector corrections, with an IBM enterprise spending warning sparking a broad software selloff as corporations aggressively shift their IT budgets away from traditional SaaS apps to cover high-cost AI hardware. Concurrently, Apple’s massive $600 billion valuation rally was increasingly characterized by Wall Street as a defensive bet by investors looking for a safe haven away from hyper-scaler capex infrastructure wars, choosing Apple’s edge-device restraint instead. Meanwhile, Tower Semiconductor announced a parallel dual-track $3 billion manufacturing expansion in Japan to scale 300mm Silicon Photonics and advanced packaging to meet skyrocketing global demand for optical AI chips. Chinese open-source model company Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3, with early benchmarks suggesting Chinese frontier models continue closing the gap while remaining dramatically cheaper to serve. Thinking Machines Lab unveiled Inkling, its first open-weight multimodal MoE model with 975B parameters, marking Mira Murati’s first public release and adding momentum to the open-model ecosystem. TSMC raised its 2026 capex forecast and announced another $100B investment in Arizona, bringing its total US commitment to $265B as AI demand continues to reshape global semiconductor manufacturing. Amazon saw longtime AWS Compute, AI & Platform chief Dave Brown step down after 19 years, with David Treadwell taking over one of the industry’s most important AI infrastructure organizations. Google continued rolling out Gemini across Workspace and Search while expanding TPU deployments, Microsoft deepened Copilot integration across Windows, GitHub and Microsoft 365, and NVIDIA continued its push into physical AI and robotics with new Cosmos capabilities. Finally, SpaceX shares briefly traded below their $135 IPO price for the first time, wiping nearly $1 trillion from their peak valuation as investors reassessed AI infrastructure and space multiples.
A WORD FROM OUR PARTNERS
As a VC Cafe community member, we can put your name forward for HubSpot’s UNBOUND giveaway: flights, hotel, and a full conference pass (worth 1599 USD, and now sold out), covered entirely.
UNBOUND 2026 runs September 16–18 in Boston, MA. This year’s speakers include Tom Brady, Mel Robbins, NASA astronaut Suni Williams, and HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan — alongside 200+ sessions across marketing, sales, and revenue ops.
If selected, you will notified by August 15. Apply here: https://offers.hubspot.com/vc-cafe-unbound
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The electric light didn’t come from the continuous improvement of candles”
Oren Harari
NEW FUNDING ROUND
- Congrats Shai Morag and team Oak – Identity Security OS on coming out of stealth with a massive $60 million Seed round o build an AI-native Identity Operating System governing human, machine, and autonomous AI-agent identities!
- Kudos Hagai Lalazar and team Hemispheric on emerging from stealth with $52 million in early-stage funding to launch Descartes, the worlds first 6-billion-parameter NeuroAI model trained on 250,000 hours of brain data to decode non-invasive EEG waves!
- Way to go Shlomi Salem and team Neo Security on securing a new $50 million financing round (bringing its total raised to over $75 million) to scale your stealth platform bridging endpoint, network, and identity security.
- Congrats Nim Ravid and team Sable on coming out of stealth with $45M in funding to develop AI agents that can navigate software, demonstrate products and handle customer conversations once reserved for human employees!
- Good stuff Gal Tal-Hochberg and team Beacon Security on raising a $13 million Seed to build the data layer powering AI cybersecurity agents!
- Mazal tov Tuvia Ohana on the $2M pre-seed round for Horizon Trade to to bring hedge fund-style trading tools to everyone!
- Great job Ran Endelman and team PlexAI on securing a $1.4 million pre-seed to modernise the commercial real estate market by replacing manual underwriting with specialised AI agents!
- Nice milestones Dr. Inbal Gat and team ETERNO on raising an undisclosed pre-seed round to launch Factor X, to deliver active ingredients directly into skin cells for anti-aging!
EXITS
- Congrats Michael Mumcuoglu and team CardinalOps on the acquisition by Cribl acquires for around $100 million!
- Kudos Idan Dobrecki and team Aiode on the acquisition by BandLab Technologies for an undisclosed sum estimated at tens of millions to create AI models designed to replicate instruments and styles while keeping artists involved in the process.
- Great stuff Ofir Zilberberg and team Arpalus on the acquisition by Instacart for an undisclosed sum to bring real-time shelf intelligence to supermarkets!
- Well done Yoav Dagan, Koren Molcho on the acquisition of Riskey (acquired by Vanta) by Vanta for an undisclosed sum, without raising VC investment!
NEW FUNDS
- Congrats Eitan Reisel and team vgames on announcing a new $500M cohort financing debt fund, to support growing apps with non-dilutive debt funding!
APPOINTMENTS
- Congratulations Noa Argamani on joining Vine Ventures to invest in Israeli startups!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ ISRAEL VC / VC CAFE
- Tokenmaxxing Was the Wrong Metric – Silicon Valley treated rising token consumption as proof of AI adoption. But tokens are an input cost, not a measure of value. As companies turn to cheaper Chinese models and Mira Murati launches Inkling, the market is shifting from tokenmaxxing to a better metric: the cost of producing a successful outcome.
- The AI Shovel Paradox: Why Israel’s AI Future Lies in Software and Silicon, Not Server Farms – Israel won’t win the AI race by building the biggest data centres. New research from Bank of America shows why the country’s long-term advantage lies in talent, silicon and software, not physical infrastructure.
- I gave a live interview to TV10 Israel in the show ‘Economic Morning’ about Pre-seed investments, AI and Israeli startups (Hebrew)
ISRAEL
- The Physical AI startup landscape by 10D maps 125 startups, that collectively raised $10 billion
- Israel’s Economy Is Thriving. Many Israelis Are Not by TIME
- 1 in 4 startups now has a solo founder as AI empowers builders – by CTech by Calcalist
GLOBAL
- State of AI bi-annual report by ICONIQ
- The 4 steps of AI adoption from the head of Claude Code at Anthropic
- Special report on women’s health by Silicon Valley Bank
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
What universities produced the most global unicorn founders? by Ilya Strebulaev
Somre of the findings from Bank of America‘s research report on AI puts Israel as one of the top AI hubs globally
Israel’s Physical AI landscape was added the landscape to my 2026 landscape collection on VC Cafe
Free dashboard on Israel’s economic indicators by IVC Data and Insights online
The Agentic AI Security Innovator Market Map provides a curated view of the emerging vendor landscape focused on securing agentic AI systems. (source)
My live TV interview on Israeli startups, AI and pre-seed investments at TV10 Israel
The top 100 European startups according to Headline (source)
The AI insurance market map by QED Investors (source)
Private companies building biology native data infrastructure by Bessemer Venture Partners (source)
Thank you for reading this week. Good luck to Argentina at the final of the world cup this Sunday!
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 – July 17 2026 - July 17, 2026
- Tokenmaxxing Was the Wrong Metric - July 16, 2026
- The AI Shovel Paradox: Why Israel’s AI Future Lies in Software and Silicon, Not Server Farms - July 15, 2026
