The original version of the newsletter was published on Linkedin.
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
Today is Black Friday and many people will be looking for bargains. Perhaps that explains the uptick in Israeli fundraising and acquisitions, which readers of the Firgun newsletter would have noticed in recent weeks.
In the wider tech world, Apple is set to overtake Samsung Electronics in smartphone shipments for the first time in 14 years. Google further encroached on NVIDIA‘s Turf With New AI Chip Push. Nvidia keeps saying that it ain’t worried about TPUs, but it can’t stop talking about it. Brookfield launched a substantial $100 billion AI infrastructure program in partnership with NVIDIA and the Kuwait Investment Authority . On the model front, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, positioning it as the best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use, while Google continued its momentum with the successful rollout of Gemini 3, claiming dominance across benchmarks with enhanced multimodal reasoning, Agent Mode for autonomous workflows, and the Nano Banana Pro image generator capable of 4K multilingual text rendering. Alibaba Group launched Quark AI smart glasses that integrate its open source AI models. On the venture capital side, AI cloud provider Lambda secured a colossal Series E funding round of over $1.5 billion, and AI-generated multimedia startup Luma AI raised $900 million in its Series C round, underscoring continued investor confidence in AI infrastructure and applications. OpenAI launched Shopping Assistant on ChatGPT (I wonder how many startups this threatens…) Yann LeCun former chief AI officer at Meta is departing to launch a physical-world AI startup.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive.” – Coco Chanel
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Alon Kollmann and team Clover Security on coming out of stealth with a $30M series AI to defend against new AI threats
- Well done Barak Perelman and team Opti on your $20M seed round for a new AI-native identity platform!
- Way to go Boris Vaynberg and team Blast Security on coming out of stealth with $10M in seed funding for your new cloud security platform!
- Kudos Yaron Galai and team Yomu on the launch and undisclosed seed funding for your new platform that encourages kids to read!
EXITS
- Way to go Josh Schwartz and team FORDEFI on the acquisition of your institutional wallet technology for $110M!
- Well done Yossi Wolf and team Roboteam on the acquisition of your robotic fleet management technology by Ondas Holdings
- Congrats Gal Ringel ?? and team MineOS on the acquisition of your consumer app by McAfee for an estimated tens of millions!
NEW FUNDS
- Congrats Avi Eyal, Eran Bielski and team Entrée Capital on raising $300M for two new funds (an early stage seed fund and an early-growth series A-B fund) focused on Israeli and global startups! Look forward to finding more opportunities to collaborate with Remagine Ventures!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE / REMAGINE VENTURES
- Mapping the Israeli gaming ecosystem with 143 companies and $3.65 billion in published exits – my team at Remagine Ventures published the Israeli gaming and gaming-tech landscape, which mapped 143 startups which collectively raised $6.6 billion in disclosed rounds, with $3.65 billion in disclosed exits (in the last 4 years)
- Check out the Remagine Ventures Monthly Pulse newsletter latest edition, including 3 new Investments we’ve made and great links for your browser!
- I published two posts this week – Why Open Source AI From China Is Eating Silicon Valley’s Lunch and AI makes the old venture playbook obsolete which are both very topical.
ISRAEL
- Great conversation between Harry Stebbings and Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44 on how vibe coding will kill SaaS and Salesforce. Since the acquisition by Wix earlier this year (with $5M in revenue at the time) Base44 reached $50M in ARR.
- The story behind the Israelis that adapt Chinese micro-series concept for the west by Globes
- Hamas spent years mining IDF troops’ social media for intel on bases, tanks etc. In response, IDF Launches Morpheus AI to Monitor Soldiers’ Social Media
GLOBAL
- MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce in finance, health and professional services
- Ilya Sutskever says that we reached the end of the scaling era in AI. This means that the future belongs to researchers with ideas, not labs with the biggest GPU clusters.
- Interesting piece on why the AI boom is a house of cards, by Niall Ferguson
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
This week my team at Remagine Ventures published the Israeli gaming and gaming tech landscape on CTech by Calcalist (source) – looking for a high resolution version? head to our shiny new website!
The Regtech market map by The LegalTech Fund (source)
China is warning of a bubble forming in the humanoid robotics space according to Bloomberg NewsMore than 150 makers of humanoid robots are operating in China and their number is still rising.
vs. Robotics in the US
Rethinking security in the age of autonomy, an interesting overview of the new guard of Agentic AI cybersecurity companies by Menlo Ventures (source)
How public companies calculate ARR (it’s not so straightforward) – source
2025 Data, Research and Information Services Landscape (source)
The top 10 most active series A investors in mega-funds and boutique funds by OpenLP (source)
A bit of levity for VCs…
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading. 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.
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – May 15 2026 - May 15, 2026
- Is Anything Fundable Anymore, Apart From Deeptech? - May 14, 2026
- Tiny Episodes, Big Business: The Israeli Startups Betting on Micro-Dramas - May 12, 2026
