Key takeaways
- Three Israeli startups emerged from stealth in July after raising a combined $340 million
- At the same this week brought another painful wave of layoffs, including monday.com cutting 20% of its workforce.
- Travis Kalanick returned with a $1.7 billion physical-AI venture, Chinese models Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8-Max shook up the AI leaderboards,
The original version of #FIRGUN was published on LinkedIn to 8,251 subscribers today!
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.
Welcome to edition #205 of the weekly #FIRGUN on Linkedin. This week in Israeli tech, three cyber startups came out of stealth with a combined $340M in funding announced days apart (one of them even reached Unicorn status!) showing the strength of the Israeli cyber ecosystem. At the same time, several massive layoffs rounds were announced, including monday.com shedding 20% of the workforce (620 people worldwide). The layoffs represent a combination of the rise of AI/ automation and the pressure created by a strong shekel, which has increased the companies burn (in dollars) and shortened runways.
In the wider tech world, Travis Kalanick is back with $1.7 billion in funding for Atoms, his new physical-AI holding company. China’s AI race entered a new phase this week as Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight coding model, shot to the top of the leaderboards and pushed annualised revenue to $300 million so fast the company had to pause new subscriptions, while Alibaba Group fired back with Qwen3.8-Max, claiming benchmark wins over GPT-4.1 and Gemini 2.5 Pro; Moonshot is now eyeing a Hong Kong IPO at a valuation above $30 billion, and the one-two punch rattled AI-linked stocks in a way that echoed the original DeepSeek shock. OpenAI had a much rockier week on the safety front, disclosing that a combination of GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased model escaped a sandboxed testing environment, exploited a zero-day vulnerability, and hacked into Hugging Face‘s production infrastructure in order to cheat on a cybersecurity benchmark, a genuinely unsettling first. Google DeepMind, meanwhile, shipped three new Gemini models: 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite and a cybersecurity-tuned 3.5 Flash Cyber for government partners, while teasing Gemini 4 on the horizon. Anthropic landed up to $5 billion in investment and chip capacity from AMD and launched an Economic Index connector inside Claude. Meta poached AWS’s Dave Brown, a 19-year infrastructure veteran, to run its data-center build-out as it lays the groundwork for a possible commercial cloud business, backed by 2026 capex guidance of $125–145 billion, while Amazon disclosed that its own custom silicon business, Trainium, Graviton and Nitro, is now running at a $20 billion annual pace with $225 billion in order commitments already booked. On the infrastructure and funding side, a BlackRock and MGX-backed consortium committed another $5 billion to Aligned Data Centers fresh off closing its $40 billion acquisition, AI-3D startup Meshy raised roughly $400 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, fintech Augustus closed $180 million at a $1 billion valuation led by Tiger Global, and battery materials maker Sila brought in $300 million, yet another reminder that the AI infrastructure and mega-round machine shows no sign of slowing down.
WORD FROM OUR PARTNERS
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.” — Golda Meir
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congrats to Roi Tiger, Omer Singer and the whole Glow team on emerging from stealth with a massive $180 million (with the latest funding being a $100M series B) at a $1.2 billion valuation to reinvent endpoint security for the AI era.
- Kudos to Nick Warner, Shlomi Salem and team Neo coming out of stealth with $100 million in funding to help enterprises secure the agentic software wave, a strong debut built on deep SentinelOne, Wiz and Palo Alto Networks pedigree.
- Congrats to Adam Pellegrini and the TytoCare team on closing a $25 million+ growth round while welcoming Adam as new CEO, to scale its AI-powered remote care platform.
- Mabruk Nadav Grossinger, Nitay Romano and team Elio on coming out of stealth with $21M to build sensors for the AI era, after spending seven years developing physical sensing systems at Meta!
- Well done to brothers Tomer Malchi, and team Asio Technologies on raising a $15 million seed round after two decades of self-funding, and on landing a tactical systems deal with defense giant Anduril worth tens of millions. Patience and grit, rewarded.
- Nice one to Tal Lutzky y and team Plantopia Bio. (formerly Pigmentum) on a $9 million round, backed by dairy giant Schreiber Foods, to move from lab to commercial-scale production of real dairy proteins grown in plants, no cows required.
- Congrats to Eric Rosenthal and team Cordant on emerging from stealth with an $8 million seed round. Four Rapyd alumni who scaled payments past a billion dollars are now building the command center for the financial infrastructure they once wrestled with themselves.
- Way to go Sanaz Yashar and team Zafran Security on securing a strategic investment from Cisco Investments, extending the company’s total funding past $140 million!
EXITS
- Congrats Tamir Or, Or Schreiber and team Dondy on the acquisition of your bootstrapped startup to Circeus to turn conversations into revenue!
NEW FUNDS
- Congratulations Oded Hermoni and team J-Ventures Fund on the launch of your new $36M fund III to back early stage Israeli startups!
MISCELLANEOUS
- Way to go Amir Wolner and Guy Franklin on launching Kibbutz NYC a new workspace and innovation centre for Israeli startups in New York!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE / REMAGINE VENTURES / ISRAEL VC
- Requests for Startups: Fall 2026 Edition — Instead of publishing a new wishlist, this edition tests the last two “requests for startups” lists against real H1 2026 Israeli funding data, then lays out ten fresh requests for the fall: from the reliability layer for enterprise agents to consumer AI that earns repeat behavior.
- Vertical AI Market Map 2026: Israeli Startups and Funding Rounds – Israeli vertical AI just crossed a real threshold in H1 2026, from copilots that help people work to systems that run entire industry workflows. But the funding tells a more complicated story: $716M went to just 24 companies, half of it swallowed by three mega-rounds, and several “hot” categories are far more crowded than they look. Here’s the full market map, by industry, with every funding round verified.
- A bunch of new funds and upgrades added to Israel VC – the most complete directory of funds investing in Israeli startups. If you’re into startup landscapes, you should also join this new group…
ISRAEL
- Europe and Israel’s founder factories – report by Dealroom.co with Accel – Across Europe and Israel, AI is acting as a force multiplier on top of the region’s existing strengths, supercharging company creation and compressing the time it takes to reach major milestones.
- Q2 2026 Israel tech review – report by IVC Data and Insights and LeumiTech the quarterly read on Israeli deal count, capital concentration and sector mix that I leaned on for this week’s Requests for Startups piece. The good news – funding levels are high, the bad news, it’s a new low record for new startups funded.
- Rethinking the Israeli IPO – new report by Jefferies – improved liquidity of Tel Aviv Stock Exchange – ?????? ??????? ??? creates more liquidity options for startups
GLOBAL
- Alibaba, Moonshot launches mark new phase in China’s AI race – Open-source Chinese AI is improving and gaining popularity – Qwen3.8-Max, Kimi-3 and the shift from scale to practical capability by CGTN
- OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach exposes AI’s next safety challenge – by Axios – will the government accelerate safety measures to prevent future hacks?
- The 2026 Generative AI Landscape Report – by Similarweb diving into LLM usage, user behavior and performance trends
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israel leads in the number of unicorns in the new report by Dealroom.co (see links section)
Highlights from the IVC Data and Insights and LeumiTech H1 2026 tech review – fundraising for Israeli startups is on the rise, but it’s spread across less companies, and mostly on later stage – see links section
All the foreign VCs and CVCs that invested in Israeli startups in H1 2026
A 2026 AI agents market map for enterprise buyers: coding agents, workflow agents, vertical agents, agent infrastructure, agent washing, and how to evaluate production-ready platforms (source)
The coding agent stack by Gradient (source)
Marc Benioff: “What most impresses me about Anthropic (besides unprecedented revenue growth) is their enterprise hat trick: the best model (Claude), the best coding agents (Claude Code), & the best productivity tool (Cowork). Salesforce is proud to be an early investor, customer, and partner” – source
The Y Combinator requests for startups list for summer 2026 (source)
That’s all for this week, 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 24 2026 - July 24, 2026
- Vertical AI Market Map 2026: Israeli Startups and Funding Rounds - July 23, 2026
- Requests for Startups: Fall 2026 Edition - July 21, 2026
