Key takeaways
- Varonis agreed to a $6.3 billion acquisition by Proofpoint, marking another major Israeli tech exit.
- Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire Decart for around $7 billion, highlighting demand for Israeli AI talent.
- Tesla’s flying-car demonstration and Meta’s open-weights Muse release added to a packed week of technology launches.
- Mega-rounds such as Ramp’s underscore how venture capital continues to concentrate in fewer, larger deals.
It’s #Firgun time!
The original version of the #FIRGUN Newsletter was published on Linkedin and emailed to 8,500+ subscribers. Sign up to be in good company :-)
Firgun (pronounced “feer-goon”) means taking genuine, unselfish joy in someone else’s success. Every week since March 2020, this newsletter has celebrated the founders, teams and investors moving our community forward. If someone forwarded this to you, you can find previous editions on VC Cafe.
With Israel heading to the polls on October 27, there’s a lot at stake for the country and its future. For the tech ecosystem, the next government’s decisions will help shape investor confidence, the ability to attract and retain talent, and Israel’s relationships with its global partners. My hope is for leadership that rebuilds trust, brings people together and gives founders the stability to keep building. The ingenuity and determination are there. They deserve the conditions to flourish.
In the wider tech world, flying cars finally had their moment: Tesla demonstrated its next-generation Roadster, using SpaceX-developed thrusters to perform airborne manoeuvres, although production is still targeted for 2028. Meta released Muse Spark Open, making the weights of its new coding and agentic model available to developers, with support for running it locally on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios. That followed its launch of Muse Wonder and Wonder Full, while Google opened Gemini 4 Argon to developers for complex coding and enterprise workflows. The funding rounds were equally eye-catching: Ramp raised $1.85 billion (!) at a $60 billion valuation, and Labelbox announced more than $100 million in Series E financing, including equity and a credit facility, to expand its work in reinforcement learning and enterprise agents. Anthropic told the press that they’ve become profitable for the first time this month with $16 billion in profit. The LLM published red-team research showing that small open-weight models could in principle self-replicate across cheap IoT devices (tested on 15 Android TV boxes), a warning that it expects to become practical by next year, and said it has cut extracted reasoning tokens 90-99% with new distillation defences. OpenAI had a stranger week: the FBI arrested a former product-team employee accused of planting a recording device in an executive conference room at its San Francisco office, the company reportedly cancelled a GPT-6.1 Astra model and the press questions a ‘missing’ $20 billion in reported revenue. Microsoft unveiled its Maia 300 chip (eight HBM4 stacks, 288GB), with multi-gigawatt deployment starting in 2027, and Character.ai filed for Chapter 11. Out of China, DeepSeek is reportedly nearing a 100 billion yuan (about $14B) round at a 500 billion yuan valuation, double its original target. Chip stocks wobbled on an IMF warning about an AI investment collapse, with SK hynix down 10% in premarket, while IDC put NVIDIA‘s China data-center AI chip share at 34% versus Huawei‘s 28%. Beyond the commercial race, CERN and Mistral teamed up to develop Flare, an AI model for particle physics. Apple launched HomeView, a new tablet for the family.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.”
George Burns
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congratulations to Shahar Bahat ?? , Tal Ofer Regev ??, and team Pluto Security on emerging from stealth with $42 million in total funding, including approximately $34 million in its latest financing to help enterprises secure the AI tools, applications and automations employees are adopting and building!
- Mazal tov to Guy Weiss, Jonatan Bien and team Zenzap on unveiling $44 million in funding, comprising an $11 million seed round and a $33 million Series A to bring employees and AI agents together in a shared messaging workspace!
- Way to go Yaniv E. and team Undecimal Bio on an $18 million seed round to deliver RNA medicines to specific cells beyond the liver, using experimental data and AI to identify promising delivery candidates.
- Kol hakavod to Thai (Elgrabli) Sade, Avi Keren and team BloomX on a $13 million Series A to combine robotics and AI to help growers pollinate crops, including blueberries and avocados!
- Kudos Jared Zelman, Raphael Assor and team Othello on coming out of stealth with $8M in seed funding to scale their AI-powered real-time sales coaching platform!
- Great stuff Gilad Salinger, Dror Wolmer and team Uvi on emerging from stealth with $7.5 million in seed funding to help AI agents access and retain company context!
EXITS
- Huge congratulations to Yaki Faitelson and the Varonis team on signing an agreement to be acquired by Proofpoint for approximately $6.3 billion in cash!
- Mazal tov to Gil Peleg, Dan Shprung and team Geniez AI (Acquired by Rocket Software) on their acquisition by Rocket Software, and a reportedly value of approximately $100 million to build AI agents for managing and modernising mainframe systems!
- Congratulations to Tom Laufer and team Loops on the announced acquisition by Salesforce, with the team and technology set to join Tableau to help businesses understand why their metrics changed!
- Congratulations to Uri Haramati and the Torii team on signing an agreement to be acquired by Freshworks for an undisclosed sum to help companies understand which software they use, who uses it and what it costs, increasingly including AI consumption. Financial terms were not disclosed.
NEW FUNDS
- Congratulations Ron Alpar on the launch of Aliyah Ventures, focused on early stage immigrant founders building technology companies in Israel! Best of luck!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE / REMAGINE VENTURES
- The neocloud boom and the race to outlive the GPUs – My look at the specialist GPU cloud providers powering the AI boom, and the financing and hardware economics behind their growth. There were 209 neoclouds tracked a year ago compared to 323 today.
- The AI opportunity hiding between capability and adoption – Why turning model capabilities into dependable workflows remains a substantial opportunity for founders.
- Get on Remagine’s radar – Israeli founders building at pre-seed, including in stealth: we’d love to hear what you’re working on.
ISRAEL
- Amazon is in talks to acquire Decart for $7 billion – after the Nvida talks fell through, there could yet be a massive exit for the Israeli AI startup
- LinkedIn’s Top Startups list for Israel 2026 – check out the list and methodology
- Tech market changes squeeze out Israeli VC – I disagree with some of the negativity of this @globes article. I still believe that small firms like Remagine Ventures can back the non-obvious very early stage bets and that more diversity is needed in the funding sources
GLOBAL
- KPMG’s Q3 venture update – Global venture investment reached $170.9 billion across 8,341 deals in Q3, with AI megadeals continuing to concentrate capital.
- What is bigger than AI? – 11% of US adults now on GLP-1s (was 3% in 2024); more Americans pay for GLP-1s than pay for AI (a16z).
- The 100 most promising European startups accoding to Sifted and N47
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Startups worldwide raised $184B in VC in Q3 2026, up 45% on the same quarter last year ($127B). It was the four highest quarter for VC funding on record, with three of the top four coming in the last three quarters. Source: Dealroom.co
We are in the age of consensus capital:
1- Almost 75% of all LP $ raised by 5 funds
2- Almost 75% of all VC $ invested in 5 companies (source)
The neocloud boom and the race to outlive GPUs… (source)
The evolving AI agents by category map by MightyBot (source)
Discussions (and fights) on X this week put to question some of venture capital’s core practices (source)
One of the coolest product launches in recent memory – the new flying Tesla Roadster
Watch the new Apple HomeView commercial. Would you buy one or is this a potential flop?
That’s all for this week. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! If someone you know has had a win, give them a little firgun. Building is hard, and recognition goes a long way.
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 – October 16 2026 - October 16, 2026
- The neocloud boom and the race to outlive the GPUs - October 14, 2026
- The AI opportunity hiding between capability and adoption - October 13, 2026
