Key takeaways
- Israeli tech announced more than $750 million in new funding, with capital concentrating around AI infrastructure, cybersecurity and agent governance.
- Cyera’s planned $1 billion acquisition of Oasis Security highlighted the growing importance of securing AI agents and non-human identities.
- Big Tech’s earnings revealed both soaring AI demand and its enormous cost, as hyperscalers committed hundreds of billions to chips, energy and data centres.
It’s #Firgun time!
The original version was published on LinkedIn to 8,200+ subscribers.
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.
Greetings from Los Angeles, my inspiration for this week’s image. I met with all sorts of investors who are interested in Israeli startups. The news from President Trump of the demilitarisation of H***s could be fantastic news, if enforced. Against that backdrop, Israeli tech delivered another remarkable week, with the cyber and AI-agent-security boom kept compounding: four separate Israeli startups building tools to secure AI agents and machine identities: Onyx, Mate, Hush and Way, all announced funding within days of each other.
In the wider tech world, NVIDIA committed $5 billion to Ilya Sutskever’s SSI in a long-term strategic partnership that hands the secretive lab an order-of-magnitude jump in compute alongside next-generation Vera Rubin systems, one of the Nvidia’s largest single bets of the AI boom. China’s open-weight offensive kept rolling as Moonshot AI published the full 2.8-trillion-parameter weights of Kimi K3 a day early, making the largest open AI model ever released free to download. OpenAI answered the pricing pressure by slashing GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and Terra by 20%, just three weeks after launch, pointing to efficiency gains but clearly feeling the heat from cheaper Chinese alternatives. Big Tech’s earnings week delivered a study in contrasts: Microsoft posted $90 billion in quarterly revenue with Azure growing 43% and crossing $100 billion for the year, Copilot doubling to more than 30 million paid seats, and shares jumping 8%; Amazon crossed $200 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time as AWS grew 37%, its fastest pace in 18 quarters, and lifted 2026 capex guidance to $220 billion, sending shares up more than 10%; while Meta beat on revenue with a 28% jump to $60.8 billion but watched free cash flow collapse as AI infrastructure spend hit $31 billion in a single quarter, dragging shares down nearly 7.5% after hours. MiniMax released H3, a video model that generates up to 15-second clips in 2K resolution with native stereo sound. Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics ER 2 – a brain for robots.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you would rather have talked.”
Mark Twain
A NOTE FROM OUR PARTNERS, HUBSPOT FOR STARTUPS
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NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congrats Yossi Meyouhas team at Xsight Labs on raising $300 million at a $2.8 billion valuation, to develop programmable silicon chips for AI and cloud networks that were successfully on SpaceX‘s new V3 satellites.
- Way to go Maxim Bar Kogan, Gil Elbaz and the Onyx Security team on closing a $113 million Series B at a $640 million valuation, just four months after emerging from stealth to help enterprises control AI agents by managing permissions, monitoring activity, and blocking malicious or unintended behaviour!
- Congrats Shahar Azulay and team groundcover on your $100 million Series C to scale your bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC), eBPF and OpenTelemetry (OTel)-native observability platform
- Mabruk Jonathan Jacobi, Gal Niv and the Enigma AI team on emerging from stealth with a $71 million seed round to build foundation models that make robots easier to deploy!
- Good news Jonathan Langer and team Act Security on coming out of stealth with $60 million in funding
- Well done Asaf Wiener and the Mate team on a $35 million Series A just eight months after your seed to help AI agents investigate threats with real context!
- Kol hakavod Nitzan Shapira and team Harmony on coming out of stealth with $34M in funding to automate employee services across enterprises!
- Nice one Micha Rave, Shmulik Ladkani and team Hush Security on a $30 million Series A to securely control enterprise AI agents and the infrastructure they run on!
- Congrats to Dvir Ginzburg and the Encore AI team on your $30 million Series A to teach AI agents how top employees work!
- A belated congrats Yadin Soffer and team Traysar Industries on securing a $25M series A to develop the world’s first subterra defence tech company!
- Well done to Yossi Barishev and team Way Security on your $20 million seed to build the operational layer that makes identity and access management systems actually work across the enterprise!
- Mazel tov Itay Keren ? the Bloom Security team on securing a $20 million seed round to build a unified endpoint security platform for AI-native devices!
- Great stuff Daniel Shimoni and team Modus on coming out of stealth with a $10M seed round offering infrastructure to solve the “Context Gap” that prevents enterprise AI agents from delivering accurate, cost-effective results!
EXITS
- Big congrats Danny Brickman and team Oasis Security on the $1 billion acquisition by Cyera!
- Not all exits are happy, but congrats Orr Danon on the acquisition of Hailo by Microchip Technology Inc. for an undisclosed sum.
NEW FUNDS
- Big congrats Michael Eisenberg, Eden Shochat and the Aleph on launching $150M fund V with a clear message: “more of the same” – with the goal to continue backing Israeli founders building significant global technology companies!
- Congratulations Maor Shlomo on launching a new fund (self funded) focused on cancer research and breakthrough therapies after losing his mother to cancer four months ago!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE/ ISRAEL VC
- The Next AI Opportunities Are the Problems AI Created (July 27) — Eze’s framework for where AI creates its own scarcities: engineering judgment as code becomes abundant, control as agents become abundant, trust as content becomes abundant, efficiency as tokens become abundant, and distribution as products become abundant. Each one is an investable category.
- Have you seen the infographic of 71 current Israeli unicorns published by Israel VC?
ISRAEL
- The Israel Innovation Authority and Ministry of Finance launched a NIS 1 billion fast-track funding programme for early stage startups affected by the strong shekel.
- Donald Trump has announced Hamas will disarm and demilitarise Gaza. The president said an agreement had been reached late last night and under the terms of the deal, which was confirmed by Hamas, a Palestinian technocratic government overseen by the US-led Board of Peace would eventually govern Gaza.
- Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence raises $5 billion from Nvidia despite not yet releasing a product – Founded in 2024 by Sutskever and Daniel Levy, SSI now employs only a few dozen people, including a research team in Tel Aviv. The company has yet to release its first product or publish research describing the technology it is building
- BONUS: Israel’s AI Czar Seeks Chip Fab, New Data Centers to Keep Edge – by Bloomberg
GLOBAL
- A coalition including OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, a16z and Y Combinator signed a letter urging Washington not to impose broad restrictions on downloadable “open-weight” AI models
- We are exposed – Using Claude Mythos Preview, researchers at Anthropic have discovered improved ways to attack cryptographic algorithms (the mathematical methods used to keep online data private). Also, models compromised real-world systems during testing… (via Axios)
- Linkedin introduces a ‘seems like AI slop’ button to increase the user experience
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The Israeli startup funnel according to Dealroom.co
The design x AI market map by Sapphire Ventures (source)
The next opportunities in AI will be solving the problems that AI has created (source: VC Cafe)
71 Israeli founded private unicorns – can also be helpful for job seekers… (source)
Agentic AI market map by Bessemer Venture Partners
Carta data shows that although the median gap between funding rounds remains around 18–24 months, the range is widening significantly, and some startups may need to survive 1,000 days, or nearly three years, without new outside capital. (source)
How to pick your AI sales strategy by Andreessen Horowitz (source)
That’s all for this week. Thank you for tuning in.
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 31 2026 - July 31, 2026
- The Next AI Opportunities Are the Problems AI Created - July 27, 2026
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – July 24 2026 - July 24, 2026
