It’s #Firgun time!
Can you believe it’s June already?
The original version of #FIRGUN was published on LinkedIn to over 8,000 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.
This week in Israel was a reminder of the strange duality of the market right now: geopolitical uncertainty and layoffs on one side, and remarkable investor appetite on the other. Israeli tech companies raised more than $1.1 billion in a matter of days… You’ll find the full breakdown in the funding section below. Exits continued as well, driven by a hot defence tech market, where Israeli battle-tested tech is at a premium. Israel’s tech sector is under pressure, but capital is still flowing to companies solving urgent problems in AI infrastructure, cyber, defence, automation and resilience.
The wider tech world this week was dominated by mega-rounds (more capital concentration), AI infrastructure news, and the public-market reopening. Ramp raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation, Supabase raised $500 million at a $10.5 billion valuation as AI coding tools drive demand for backend infrastructure, Impulse Space raised $500 million, Flourish AI Labs raised $500 million to build low-power “brain-like” AI, Helion, the Sam Altman-backed Fusion Energy Startup, raised $465 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, Generalist raised $400 million for robotics, Suno raised more than $400 million, and AlphaSense raised $350 million. The platform wars also intensified: OpenAI models and Codex became generally available on Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft pushed deeper into agentic computing with Scout (an always on personal agent), MAI models and Project Solara (a new agent platform), while NVIDIA and Microsoft unveiled RTX Spark PCs for local AI agents. Apple also quietly moved into the agent economy, approving Poke as the first AI agent on Messages for Business, while its App Store ecosystem hit $1.4 trillion in 2025 billings and sales, with consumer AI apps growing faster than the broader app economy. On the infrastructure side, Cloudflare acquired VoidZero (acquired by Cloudflare), the company behind Vite and related JavaScript tooling, reinforcing how strategic developer infrastructure has become in the AI-native web. And on the frontier AI side, Anthropic said more than 80% of code merged into its own codebase is now authored by Claude, while the FT reported the company is helping the NSA deploy Mythos for offensive cyber operations, a sign that frontier models are moving from productivity tools into national-security infrastructure. Meanwhile, the IPO window continued to warm up, with Quantinuum raising $1.68 billion in its Nasdaq debut and SpaceX preparing what could become the largest IPO ever (raising $75 billion at over $1.75 Trillion valuation). The takeaway: AI is no longer just a product cycle: it is reorganising cloud, chips, developer tools, robotics, energy, defence, consumer interfaces and capital markets. NVIDIA also directly challenged Intel and AMD by unveiling its new “M1X” central processing unit (CPU) for personal computers, a piece of silicon co-developed alongside Microsoft as hyperscalers aggressively rush to build local, on-device AI architectures.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Not all those who wander are lost.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Big congrats Ido Susan and team DriveNets on securing a $410M series D at $8.5 billion valuation to allow Telcos and AI developers to build, scale, and manage their networks like modern cloud data centres!
- Way to go Yotam Segev and team Cyera on completing a $300M round at $12 billion valuation (just months after your previous $400M round in January!) to continue scaling your comprehensive Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution!
- Well done Ariel Assaraf and team Coralogix on your $200M series F to obliterate slow, costly, and outdated observability with AI!
- Mazel tov Erez Freibach and team ZutaCore on raising a $100M series C for your direct-to-chip liquid cooling designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads!
- Kudos Itai Ben-Zaken and team Honeycomb Insurance on securing a $40M series C to reinvent real estate insurance!
- Kol hakavod Gal Rimon and team Centrical on raising $39M series D to measure frontline employee performance with AI!
- Thumbs up Ofer Ballin and team Shifters on coming out of stealth with $10.2M seed round to build autonomous ground robotic systems and AI software platforms for hazardous environments!
- Congratulations Eyal Ben Ezra and team Willow on coming out of stealth with $7M in funding for an AI agent control layer in enterprises!
- Good stuff Dan Bendler ?? and team Offroad on coming out of stealth with a $7M seed round to build an AI identity security team for the modern enterprise!
- Nice job Noam Tenne and team Sky Valley Ambient Computing on securing a $2M pre-seed round to make websites adaptive by default!
EXITS
- Big congrats Zohar H. and team D-Fend Solutions on the $1.5 billion acquisition by Motorola Solutions for your counter-drone technology for critical infrastructure!
- Way to go Ronnen Lovinger and team DustPhotonics on completing the $954M acquisition by Credo Technology Group, LLC for your silicon photonics technology for data centres and AI applications!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES/ ISRAEL VC
- Israeli High-Tech 2026: Stronger, Bigger and More Vulnerable Than It Looks – a recap of the IIA state of Israeli tech 2026 report
- Capital Is Concentrating: What 13 Israeli $100M+ Rounds Tell Us About the 2026 Market – almost $4 billion were raised by 13 companies in the past 3 months alone. We’re seeing a huge concentration of capital in tech globally, and there are real implications on graduation rates from seed to series A and onwards.
- Consumer AI Is Back. Retention Will Decide Who Wins – AI is invigorating consumer tech, and Israeli B2C startups are no exception. What are the top categories?
ISRAEL
- Israeli High-Tech Annual Report 2026 – by the Israel Innovation Authority ???? ???????
- Most people across 36 countries have negative views of Israel and little confidence in Netanyahu – A bit depressing, but some bright spots, new research by Pew Research Center
- The $400 Drone Bomb and the $19B Defense Export Boom – “The contrast is absurd. Israel exported $19.2 billion worth of military technology last year, an all-time record. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers in Lebanon are defending themselves with fishing nets against drones that cost less than a night at a standard Tel Aviv hotel” – by Amir Mizroch
GLOBAL
- The InfraRed report on the state of AI infrastructure in 2026 by Redpoint
- A functional taxonomy of world models – by Fei-Fei Li
- The state of agentic eCommerce by Bain & Company
- Bonus – the case for AI datacentres in space (easier to cool, free solar energy, no space constraint, cheaper to send payload to space)
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Did you know that most of the Growth in Israeli High-Tech Output in 2025 Came from Hardware? (source)
How capital is concentrating in Israeli tech and expands from traditional SaaS to more specialised sectors (source)
Take this ranking with a grain of salt (because we’re missing China) but nevertheless, Israel ranked #3 globally in innovation according to StartupBlink (source)
Visual code generation landscape by Andreessen Horowitz (source)
The semiconductors supply chain chokepoints
It’s easier than ever to vibe code an app, but it’s equally hard to sell it.
Where do the ultra-rich choose to live in 2026?
Stripe Atlas data suggests solo-founder companies are being created at a faster rate than companies with multiple founders, across both AI and non-AI categories (source).
That’s all for this week, thank you for reading! 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 – June 5 2026 - June 5, 2026
- Consumer AI Is Back. Retention Will Decide Who Wins. - June 4, 2026
- Capital Is Concentrating: What 13 Israeli $100M+ Rounds Tell Us About the 2026 Market - June 3, 2026
