It’s #Firgun time! The original version of this newsletter was published on Linkedin. Subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.
In November #FIRGUN officially celebrates 5 years. See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going.
In case you’re new here, the word “Firgun” (pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is an informal modern Hebrew term and concept in Israeli culture (originally Yiddish), which describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other person. It’s the opposite of “schadenfreude” (which stands for being happy for someone else’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for members of our community’s accomplishments, good fortune and wins. More about the concept of Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
I am writing this edition on a flight on my way back from Slush in Helsinki, where I got a good pulse check on European tech. Given my investment focus and passion for Israeli startups, I couldn’t help but to draw the comparisons between the two. This is probably better express in a longer blog post, but suffice to say Israel’s density of talent, capital and sheer ambition to build world-leading tech companies has never been stronger. It was great to hear positive sentiment echoed from co-investors (mainly US funds) and leading ecosystem players.
In the wider tech world, this has been a monumental week for Google with the release of the Gemini 3 family of models, putting it square at the top of LLM performance (check out the gemini 3 nano-banana pro!). The competitive heat intensified as Microsoft hosted Ignite 2025, unveiling its new Agent Factory platform, a crucial component in its strategy to power the “Frontier Firm” through agentic AI, alongside its SQL Server 2025 and new Azure database services. But the biggest headline came from Anthropic, whose valuation reportedly soared to $350 billion after securing a massive new strategic investment partnership totalling up to $15 billion from Microsoft and NVIDIA, solidifying the circular investment trend that dominates the AI ecosystem. Speaking of Nvidia, CEO Jensen Huang reported another stellar quarter with a record revenue of $57.0 billion, up 22% from Q2 and up 62% from a year ago and talking down talks of a bubble in AI. Meanwhile, OpenAI focused on applications, announcing a multi-year partnership with Intuit to embed its frontier models into financial products and launching a free education-focused ChatGPT for U.S. K-12 teachers. On the infrastructure front, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a major deal with HUMAIN, deploying up to 150,000 AI accelerators including Nvidia’s latest GB300s and AWS‘s own Trainium chips in Saudi Arabia, while Meta continued its open-source push by releasing Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) and a landmark open dataset for wildlife conservation. Finally, the open-source battle saw an emergent front from China, with reports highlighting the growing global adoption and efficiency of lighter, Chinese-developed open models, which are increasingly challenging US-based proprietary systems. Cloudflare brought much of the Internet to a halt this week with an outage on November 18.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” — Phil Jackson
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Is it too early to congratulate Lior Div and team 7AI on the $100M series A for their AI-driven cyber incident response platform (the news said ‘set to raise’)
- Way to go Amos P. and team Guardio on securing an $80M series B as consumer cybersecurity demand surges!
- Congratulations Or Bokobza and team Venn on your $52M series B to streamline life for renters and landlords!
- Well done Rom Carmel ? and team Apono on securing a $34M series B to eliminate standing cloud permissions!
- Big thumbs up Ariel Chen and team Chargeflow on raising a $25M series A (and an additional $10M in Debt) to fight the surge in transaction denials!
- Good stuff Yishai Lehavi and team TULU on your $17M series A extension to scale your AI-driven product access platform to buildings around the world!
- Mazel tov Asaf Wiener and team Mate Security on coming out of stealth with $15.5M in seed funding to target alert overload with reasoning models and autonomous agents!
- Awesome milestone Adar Hay and team Jiga on your $12M series A to scale your transparent custom manufacturing platform for professionals!
- Great news Rom Kshuk and team Cassidy Bio on securing an $8M seed round to build AI-first platform for designing genetic medicines!
- Kol hakavod Ben Levy and team Localbird on securing a $7.4M seed round to build the first AI concierge for short term rentals!
EXITS
- Congrats Shahar Levi and team Locusview on your acquisition by Itron, Inc. for $525M as AI sparks energy-infrastructure boom!
- Great news Chemi Katz and team Wandz.ai on the acquisition by AB Tasty for an estimated $30M!
- Well done Yuval Gonczarowski and team Akooda (acquired by Tulip) on the acquisition by Tulip Interfaces for an estimated tens of millions!
- Kudos Sagiv Ofek and team liblab on the acquisition by Postman for an undisclosed sum!
- Mazal tov Or Briga and Shai Arnon on the acquisition of Galleon (acquired by Stash) by Stash for an undisclosed sum!
NEW FUNDS
- Well done Michel Habib and team ALIVE Ventures on the launch of a your new $200M fund focused on advanced stage Israeli and global healthcare!
- Big congrats Liron Azrielant, Daniel Roditi and team Meron Capital on the new $70M fund dedicated to early stage Israeli startups!APPOINTMENTS
APPOINTMENTS
- Congratulations Galia Beer-Gabel on your appointment as Managing Partner for Team8 in New York!
- Congrats Gil Shai on joining the team at Meron Capital as Managing Partner!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES
- It’s Time to Build: Capital Is Aggressively Chasing Quality in Israeli Tech by me on VC Cafe
- Israeli VC firm Remagine secures $25m for AI, digital startups – by Tech in Asia
- I’ve added a few new landscapes to my r/startuplandscapes community on Reddit, Inc. !
ISRAEL
- Israeli VC fundraising back on the rise by Globes
- Salesforce, Figma and HubSpot turn to Israel in the hunt for next-gen AI talent– by CTech by Calcalist
- Israel’s tech economy emerges stronger from wartime crisis – by The Jerusalem Post
GLOBAL
- The state of European tech 2025 report – by Atomico
- AI eats the world presentation by Benedict Evans
- VCs abandon old rules for a ‘funky time’ of investing in startups – interest comments on the reasons for the ‘series A’ crunch by leading Silicon Valley VCs on TechCrunch Disrupt
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
State of US Pre-seed in Q3 2025 (by Carta – Compared to the first three quarters of 2024, the same time period of 2025 had more pre-seed rounds under $1 million and fewer larger than $1 million. Valuation caps hold steady or climb: In the past 12 months, valuation caps for post-money SAFEs have stayed flat for most round sizes.
Europe’s “Mighty 50” from the State of European Tech 2025 by Atomico (source)
A new class of Agentic Platforms is rebuilding finance from the ground up — spanning data access, FP&A, revenue accounting, close automation, advisory, and core systems of record. – The fintech AI market map by Sapphire Ventures (was added to my reddit community r/startuplandscapes)
Building a moat in the AI era comes from owning critical workflows and unlocking proprietary, hard-to-replicate data, not from racing to ship the next model-powered feature. It’s a reminder that differentiation now lives where deep domain understanding meets operational complexity – interesting research by Insight Partners
Related – 7 moats for AI companies based on the advice from YC partners (source)
Help wanted: fully scaled agents by Andreessen Horowitz (source)
Food for thought from Benedict Evans on why CTOs aren’t rushing to deploy AI at scale… (source)
That’s all for this week, thanks for tuning in. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!
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.
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