Key takeaways
- Sentra and Brava raised $165 million between them to tackle different security problems as AI agents enter enterprises.
- TailorMed’s reported $250 million deal and Affle’s $420 million agreement for Perion span healthcare and adtech.
- The Texas governor’s race made local support for data centres an issue for AI investors.
- Sequoia is closing its London office and ending its scout programme after raising roughly $10 billion in new funds.
It’s #Firgun time!
The original version of the newsletter was published on LinkedIn to approximately 8,700 subscribers.
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Firgun (pronounced ‘feer-goon’ or for halloween ‘feargoon’) 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.
President Trump said this week that the US would end its annual military aid to Israel by the end of the year, arguing that Israel no longer needs it. The figure under the current agreement is $3.8 billion a year, much of it spent on American-made defence equipment. The agreement runs through 2028, so how an earlier cutoff would work is still unclear. It got me thinking about what sovereignty means for Israeli tech. If a US provider changed its terms tomorrow, which Israeli hospitals, businesses or public services could keep running? I’d like the next government to take stock of where we depend on overseas cloud providers and AI models, and make sure Israeli founders and researchers can get the computing power they need at home.
As for who might lead that government, parties representing 67 of the Knesset’s 120 members recommended Gadi Eisenkot for the first chance to form a coalition, compared with 46 for Benjamin Netanyahu. That puts Eisenkot in the strongest position on paper. Getting those parties to agree on a government is a different matter. President Isaac Herzog plans to announce his choice on Sunday, November 8, after further talks with party leaders.
In the wider tech world, the US midterms gave tech investors a reason to pay attention to governors’ races. Texas elected a Democratic governor after a campaign in which data centres became a live issue, and tech stocks fell to their worst day in 19 months, as investors reassessed which projects could go ahead. On the frontier-lab side, Anthropic‘s updated filing says it may soon reach its own threshold for dramatically accelerated AI-assisted research, while OpenAI reportedly trimmed its raise to about $20 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation. The same digest has Amazon Web Services (AWS) growing 39.3% to nearly $46 billion and Meta’s ad revenue up 26%, plus Apple‘s first Apple Intelligence features for China, some powered by Alibaba Group’s Qwen. Meituan also released LongCat-2.5, a 1.6-trillion-parameter coding model. On the product front, Perplexity launched Teammates, always-on agents that can run several jobs at once, and Google rolled out Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, extending generated video clips from 10 to 15 seconds while cutting the cost by 30%. Binance explained how a fake job interview gave attackers a way in and how they exploited an internal AI tool in the $6.3 billion theft that the FBI attributed to North Korea. The money kept moving: Thinking Machines Lab is reportedly raising $5 billion at a $40 billion pre-money valuation, and fal raised a reported $1.3 billion. Shield signed a deal worth up to $5.3 billion for radar maker Echodyne, and Salesforce agreed to buy defense-logistics startup Rune Technologies for a reported $375 million. And closer to home, Sequoia Capital announced it is closing its London office, winding down its scout programme and Arc accelerator, and combining its venture and growth teams after raising roughly $10 billion in new funds. Many European VCs saw the opportunity to advocate the case for European tech.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
— Admiral James Stockdale
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Kol hakavod to Yoav Regev, Asaf Kochan, Ron Reiter and team Sentra on raising a $150 million Series C to help companies see and control what sensitive information can AI agents risk.
- Well done Amit Gal-Or and team 42AI on coming out of stealth with a $62.5M seed round (self funded) to build a “behavioral world model” that can predict human behaviour!
- Mabruk to Idan Basre, Itay Gabbay and team Brava Security on coming out of stealth with a $15 million seed round to recreate the traces an attack would leave in a company’s systems, so the security team can find out whether its alarms would actually go off!
EXITS
- Mazal tov Israel (Srulik) Dvorsky, Adam Siton and team TailorMed on the acquisition by GrowthCurve Capital for a reported $250M to connect patients and carers with financial and medical support programs across the United States!
- Good stuff Tal Jacobson and team Perion on the agreement to be acquired by India’s Affle for $420 million in cash. While it’s a bittersweet milestone, an exit is nevertheless an outcome.
- Kudos Matan Saat and team Azimut.ai on the acquisition by Windward to identify ‘dark fleet’ vessels using using existing daylight and infrared cameras! The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
APPOINTMENTS
- Congrats Navot Volk for getting promoted to General Partner at Ground Up Ventures!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE/ REMAGINE VENTURES/ ISRAEL VC
- Israel’s AI Infrastructure stack: AI sovereignty depends on controlling data, models, compute and operations, so Israel should both build global AI infrastructure companies and secure affordable compute for its own researchers and startups.
- Sequoia’s London exit: what Europe can learn from Israel – Sequoia says it doesn’t see the need for a local presence in London, and Sequoia’s history in Israel shows investor relationships can outlast office closures.
- Requests for Startups: Winter 2027 edition – A review of RFS lists from YC, Pear, a16z, Menlo and QED, arguing the real opportunity is making AI products dependable for customers rather than chasing crowded headline categories.
- Big ideas, basic questions – Even ambitious deep-tech startups should answer basic questions early: team expertise, how customers buy, whether economics hold beyond the demo, and what each round must prove.
ISRAEL
- Israeli startups raised at least $872 million in October, led by cybersecurity and AI – a productive month continuing the trend of concentration of bigger tickets into fewer deals.
- Palo Alto Networks is negotiating to buy Clutch, which secures non-human identities and AI-agent credentials and also Beacon, a two-year-old startup building AI agents for threat detection and response
- Israeli defense-tech investment set to nearly triple to $1 billion in 2026 – The major advantage of Israeli defense-tech developments is that most of them are combat-proven. These are not theoretical products
GLOBAL
- Sequoia’s original announcement of how it’s changing – Sunsetting the accelerator and scout programmes, closing the London office, merging early and growth into one team, flattening the partnership. As Pat Grady mentioned in the video below: bigger is not better, you need “fewer better things”. The power law means 1% of companies produce 99% of returns, and an outlier founder needs an outlier partner.
- The state of enterprise AI by Menlo Ventures – Enterprise AI deployment spend scaled to $177B by September 2026, up from $33B last year. Growth is accelerating: 5.4x vs. 3.9x a year ago. Every dollar that went into developing models this year is generating $1.70 of revenue
- The UK national cyber security center published its annual report – in a nutshell, threats are on the rise – by National Cyber Security Centre
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israel’s AI Infrastructure Stack. This week’s map follows the layers underneath an AI application, from compute and networking to databases and the software that keeps the application running. (source)
Israeli defence sector continues to attract funding and M&A – check out this recent summary by IVC Data and Insights (source)
Serial unicorn founders – list of founders that started two or more unicorns, including Israel’s OGs Amnon Shashua and Shlomo Kramer by Dealroom.co (source)
Mapping the simulation economy – landscape by Sapphire Ventures (source)
400LLMs ranked (source)
Sequoia Capital co managing partner Pat Grady on the recent changes made by the fund: getting smaller, closing London office and shutting down their Arc and scout programs to focus on big tickets…
That’s all for this week. If you know someone looking for their first customer, here’s a particularly good form of firgun: think of one person who feels the problem they’re solving, and offer to make the introduction. A Friday email that takes you two minutes might give a founder the most useful conversation they have next week.
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 6 2026 - November 6, 2026
- Israel’s AI Infrastructure stack - November 5, 2026
- Sequoia’s London exit: what Europe can learn from Israel - November 4, 2026
