Key takeaways
- Israeli founders continue to attract global capital, with Daylight’s $80 million Series B among this week’s highlights.
- More funding does not mean broader access: US Series A dollars rose roughly 60% through October, while deal counts remained broadly steady.
- Small beginnings still matter: a third of US pre-seed rounds on Carta were below $250,000 in Q3 2026.
- AI wealth is highly concentrated: frontier labs and foundation model companies represent 9% of Bessemer Venture Partners’ AI 100 but hold 55% of its value.
- AI agents are becoming a new audience for businesses, changing how products are discovered, evaluated and purchased
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, we celebrate the wins of our startup community. If someone forwarded this to you, previous editions are on VC Cafe.
Israel took another step towards its next government this week, with President Isaac Herzog giving Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form a coalition. A mandate is not a government, and bringing the potential partners together remains a substantial challenge. My hope is that the outcome gives the country, and the founders building its future, more stability, confidence in its institutions and room to plan beyond the next crisis.
In the wider tech world, Jensen Huang’s resignation from NVIDIA after 33 years dominated the headlines. CFO Colette Kress has taken over as interim CEO, with the board searching for a permanent successor. Huang’s contribution to modern computing is extraordinary, and recognising that does not put a founder beyond accountability. Beyond the immediate market reaction, I’m watching what the transition means for Nvidia’s startup investments, customer financing and relationships across the AI ecosystem. The company says its product roadmap and customer commitments will continue without interruption. Anthropic, meanwhile, launched its proposed IPO roadshow, with 825 million shares offered at an expected $70–$78 range and a planned Nasdaq listing under ANT. It also introduced Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2, while Google launched Gemini 4 Hydrogen. The competition increasingly involves choosing the right model for each part of a job, balancing capability, speed and cost. In creative AI, Adobe and The Walt Disney Company announced a multi-year alliance, including custom Firefly Foundry models tailored to Disney’s properties and creative workflows. Meta’s Muse added calls to US businesses for paying subscribers. The ambition keeps growing, along with the need to make these systems dependable. On the China side, ByteDance co-founder said that a Muse-style personal AI agent is coming within weeks and that the company expects to reach the frontier by 2029 to 2030. while Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3.1 Pro weights are now reportedly on Hugging Face. Elsewhere, Google DeepMind released AlphaGenome 2, which predicts how DNA variants behave in specific cell types and is available for non-commercial research. OpenAI reportedly closed about $11 billion of a round that could reach $20 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation. The money kept moving too: Mercor raised $750 million at a $20 billion valuation, Path Robotics raised $300 million at $2.45 billion, LangChain reportedly raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation, CoreWeave reported $3.66 billion in quarterly revenue, Nominal raised $240 million at $3 billion, Dutch defence-tech Onodrim Industries reported $300 million Series A at a $1.3 billion valuation, and Rox $100 million at $1.3 billion to take on Salesforce, while Mavria, which builds factory-made data centres, is reportedly valued at about $1 billion.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow.” – Abraham Lincoln
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Kol hakavod Hagai Shapira, Eldad Rudich and team Daylight Security on an $80 million Series B to combine AI agents with human security experts to detect, investigate and respond to cyber threats!
- Well done Avner Aharoni, Evgeney Ryzhyk, Alexander Sloutsky, Yoni Leibowitz and team Edelbyte on emerging from stealth with $70 million raised across two rounds: a previously raised $25 million seed and a $45 million Series A for their an AI-native unified data platform for high-speed search and big data analytics!
- Mabruk Yehuda Niv and team Spines on securing $64 million in growth capital for your AI publishing platform: $29 million in Series A-1 plus a $35 million financing facility to help authors take their manuscripts through editing, design, production and distribution, and reports a $50 million revenue run rate. A reminder that Israeli AI extends well beyond cyber!
- Kudos Yuval Zacharia, Aner Morag, Boris Danilovich and team Bay on coming out of stealth with $50 million in total funding. That includes a $37 million Series A and a previously undisclosed $13 million seed round tackle the problem of agents having legitimate permissions and still take actions that put a business at risk!
- Good stuff Ziv Kedem, Oded Kedem, Avi Raichel and team Dreeze on a $33 million seed round to take on cloud application recovery, including the infrastructure, configurations and dependencies needed to get a business running again!
- Congrats Ilan Kadar, Elad Levi and team Plurai on a $13 million seed round to apply lessons from autonomous-driving simulation to enterprise agents, finding failures in testing before customers encounter them in production.
- Impressive milestone Idan Nurick, Ehud Schneorson and team Ribon (still in stealth) on raising undisclosed funding (ranging up to $200M in tranches) intro a company before it’s even founded!
EXITS
- Mazal tov Dor Sarig, Ziv Karliner and team Pillar Security on the reported agreement to be acquired by Vanta for approximately $150 million, in cash and shares to help connect AI governance policies with technical controls!
- Well done Yoni Shtein, Yael Peled Adam and team Laguna Health on the acquisition by Elligint Health for an undisclosed sum to empower healthcare management teams to automate clinical documentation, monitor call quality, and support member interactions
- Kudos Yoav Berlatzky and team PxE Holographic Imaging on the acquisition by metalenz to capture colour and depth information using a single camera using the company’s Holocoder technology. Terms were not disclosed.
NEW FUNDS
- Congrats Eric Reiner, Adam Valkin and team Vine Ventures on closing a $236 million Fund III, to continue investing across the US–Israel early stage technology ecosystem!
- Well done Dror Nahumi, Assaf Harel and the global team at Norwest on announcing a $4 billion eighteenth fund, spanning venture and growth equity across technology, healthcare and consumer, reaffirming the firm’s commitment to Israel and India!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE / REMAGINE VENTURES / ISRAELVC
- When AI Builds AI – What changes when AI contributes to developing its successors? I explore the feedback loop, the implications for oversight and where startups can build as development accelerates.
- What Did Your AI Agent Just Do? – Agents can send emails, spend money and act in our name. We need to be able to reconstruct their actions, understand who authorised them and intervene when necessary. This week’s deals show how commercially relevant that problem is becoming.
- AI Safety: Who Should We Believe? – The safety debate has well-funded advocates on every side. A look at how to separate evidence from advocacy, examine incentives and understand where Israeli startups can contribute.
- Bonus: Think you know your startups, VC and AI? Test yourself with the IsraelVC quiz and the VC Cafe quiz, then share your score! And if you know anyone looking for job with Israeli startups, we now link to 3,079 job records across 318 venture-backed startups!
ISRAEL
- Israel must build own AI infrastructure or risk dependence on foreign tech, AI czar warns – Erez Askal says independent infrastructure is critical for energy, water, and healthcare, which will run on AI within 7 years; plan requires government funding; “Israel is one of the three countries at the frontier of AI, after the US and China. Israel is in a similar league in terms of technological capabilities – not in terms of the number of people. Nvidia’s chips are either designed entirely in Israel or involve Israeli teams in their development.”
- CrowdStrike’s business chief: “We’re long on Israel and we’re not going anywhere” – The cybersecurity giant has continued acquiring Israeli startups through the war with Iran and now employs more than 500 people in the country. Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard says partnerships, rather than acquisitions, are the main opportunity for local startups, while warning that AI is making strong products easier to replicate.
- From Startup Nation to Space Nation: Israel’s space industry goes global – For the first time, Israel will have a national pavilion at Space Tech Expo Europe in Germany, bringing together defense giants and startups; industry leaders say falling launch costs and growing demand for satellite technology could open new opportunities for Israeli innovation
GLOBAL
- State of Pre-Seed: Q3 2026 – More capital is flowing into fewer pre-seed financing instruments. For US deals of $2.5 million or more, the median post-money SAFE cap rose from $30 million to $40 million year over year. Worth reading for founders and first-cheque investors, remembering that a SAFE cap is not a priced-round valuation, by Carta
- Series A in 2026: Capital Is Flowing Faster, but Fewer Startups Are Making the Cut – US Series A funding reached $42 billion through October, roughly 60% higher year over year, while deal counts remained broadly in line with recent years – by Crunchbase
- The AI 100: Benchmarks for the Third Supercycle – The inaugural ranking puts its selected companies’ aggregate private valuation at $3.6 trillion, with median annual revenue growth of 275% and a median ARR multiple of 23x. Useful benchmarks for the leaders, rather than a picture of the average AI startup. By Bessemer Venture Partners and Newcomer. Related – The 2026 Leonis AI 100 (by Leonis Capital) benchmarks the fastest-growing AI-native startups.
- Welcome to the B2A Economy – Olivia Moore and Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz explore how businesses might acquire customers when agents increasingly discover, compare and buy on our behalf. See landscapes below.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The first map of Israel’s WasteTech ecosystem: 80 companies across the full waste journey, from production and collection to treatment and pollution control. Nearly 60% turn waste into materials, fuels, food ingredients or energy, and most are already running pilots or working with first customers by PLANETech – Climate Change Technologies – the map was added to my 2026 Israeli landscape collection on VC Cafe.
Building on Remagine Ventures’ Q4 2025 landscape (which originally profiled 143 companies), direct-to-consumer mobile gaming monetization platform Appcharge has published an updated 2026 Israeli Gaming Landscape capturing the active studios and infrastructure powering the sector today. It was also added to my 2026 Israeli startup landscape collection on VC Cafe.
Where AI’s private-market value sits. Bessemer Venture Partners AI 100 charts show frontier labs and foundation-model builders representing 9% of the list but 55% of its aggregate valuation (source)
When the central bank of AI changes chairs… on the uncertainty that surrounds future investments by NVIDIA under new leadership and its expected impact on the AI industry – by Tomasz Tunguz (source)
Andreessen Horowitz (Olivia Moore and Justine Moore ) has introduced the B2A (Business-to-Agent) Economy thesis alongside two market maps profiling the emerging ecosystem where AI agents replace humans as the primary users, buyers, and traffic drivers of the internet – Welcome to the B2A (Business to Agent) economy (source)
According to new benchmarks published by Zapier, even the best AI agents only get complex business workflows right about half the time. Worse, when they fail, they often report success! 72%–91% of failed runs across the models examined included a claim that the task was complete. (source) and link to research
Maybe Jensen wishes this was actually a movie, but the memes just kept coming this week.
But joking aside, the AI boom is in many ways linked to Jensen personally, and bedroom/marital transgressions aside, his contribution to the economy and to technology is immense. Credit to Shaun Maguire for calling it out when everyone is busy roasting Jensen. (source)
That’s all for this week. A practical form of firgun: if a founder you know is trying to turn a pilot into a paying customer, introduce them to someone who owns the problem they’re solving. An engaged customer and honest feedback can do more for a young company than another round of applause.
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 – November 13 2026 - November 13, 2026
- AI Safety: Who Should We Believe? - November 10, 2026
- What Did Your AI Agent Just Do? - November 8, 2026
