Key takeaways
- Israeli deep tech attracts strategic interest. Intel’s reported $2.3 billion Classiq acquisition puts quantum software in the spotlight.
- Funding and exits span multiple sectors. Upwind expanded its round to $400 million, Bites raised $40 million, and NeuReality and Robusta found buyers.
- AI growth comes with tougher economic questions. Mega-rounds and rising cloud demand make sustainable margins, customer value and cash generation increasingly important.
It’s #Firgun time!
The original version of the newsletter was published on LinkedIn. Subscribe to join the 8,500+ subscribers who get the newsletter directly in their inboxes.
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.
Israel went to the polls this week, and the result is another political deadlock. Netanyahu’s bloc took 53 seats, Eisenkot’s Yashar-led opposition 48, Arab parties a record 19 – neither side can form a government (61 needed). My hope is that the people negotiating our future remember what is at stake beyond the coalition arithmetic: trust, strong democratic institutions, and the confidence to build companies, careers and families in Israel. Whatever your politics, we need leadership that gives talented people reasons to stay and build.
In the wider tech world, Anthropic publicly filed for its IPO, with a potential raise of up to $100 billion, setting up a major test of investor appetite for AI. Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon, touting advances in coding, cybersecurity and long-running agent tasks, with access initially limited to selected cyber defenders and trusted partners. NVIDIA committed to invest $3 billion in Meta as the companies expanded their partnership around Muse models and agents, while OpenAI and ServiceNow deepened their collaboration to bring enterprise workflows directly into ChatGPT. DeepSeek accused of distilling OpenAI’s Astra to train its latest models. The mega-rounds kept coming: FuriosaAI raised $620 million at a $2.9 billion valuation for AI inference chips; Bedrock Robotics secured $600 million at a $4.1 billion valuation to scale autonomous construction equipment; and Serval announced $150 million at a $3 billion valuation for enterprise automation. Meanwhile, Cognition is reportedly weighing another round at a $70–80 billion valuation, just weeks after its last financing valued it at $48 billion. Public markets were more demanding: Microsoft delivered 48% Azure growth, but Alphabet Inc. faced a sharp sell-off despite Google Cloud more than doubling revenue, as investors questioned cash burn and slowing search growth. From chips and construction sites to coding and enterprise workflows, AI’s reach keeps expanding. So does the pressure to turn that ambition into durable businesses.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”— Seneca
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Kol hakavod to Amiram Shachar and team Upwind Security on expanding their latest financing to $400 million at a $3.8 billion valuation to help companies identify and prioritise threats in live cloud environments as AI adds new security challenges!
- Huge congratulations to Eran Heffetz, Tal Nagler Almog, Hagai Horovitz and team Bites on raising a $40 million Series A to turn company knowledge into short, personalised training for frontline employees!
- Mabruk Asaf Gilboa-Amir, Liran Tam and team WhiteSage on coming out of stealth with $20M in funding to operate at the intersection of an AI research lab and private equity by identifying and acquiring traditional businesses and supercharging them with AI!
- Great stuff Thai (Elgrabli) Sade, Avi Keren and team BloomX on securing a $13M series A to transform agricultural pollination with robotics and AI!
- Way to go Roy Shmuel and team Sightec on securing $6 million in fresh funding for your visual-navigation technology helps drones operate when GPS is unavailable!
- Well done Omer Bar Tal and team Dalet Labs on securing a $7 million seed round to create Scene, a new personalised shopping assistant that suggest the user products based on their taste and interactions!
EXITS
- Big respect to Nir Minerbi, Amir Naveh, Dr. Yehuda Naveh and team Classiq on the reported $2.3 billion acquisition by Intel! Founded in 2020, Classiq develops software that makes quantum computers easier to program. This is the largest Quantum acquisition globally to date!
- Mazal tov to Moshe Tanach and team NeuReality on the acquisition by Naveen Rao’s Unconventional AI for an estimated $200M-$250M to bring Israeli silicon and systems expertise into a company pursuing more efficient AI computing, reinforcing the strategic importance of the infrastructure behind inference.
- Big congratulations to Natan Yellin, Arik Alon and team Robusta Dev on joining Freshworks! Robusta’s AI investigates technology incidents, identifies likely causes and recommends fixes. Freshworks plans to bring that capability into Freshservice and connect it with FireHydrant’s incident response workflows. Financial terms were not disclosed.
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
VC CAFE / REMAGINE VENTURES
- From Startup Nation to Scale-up Nation: Israel’s Next Growth Challenge — My reflections on scaling, AI, and keeping more of the value created by Israeli companies in Israel.
- IsraelVC Jobs – We are currently showing over 2,000 open roles for venture-backed Israeli startups. My hope is that it serves as a resource to bring talent and exciting startups together in a more efficient way.
ISRAEL
- Israel emerges as a global quantum innovation hub – a new report by the Israel Innovation Authority
- Investors turn to Israel’s battle-tested defense-tech start-ups as funding hits record $40.8b – Investments are pouring into military and dual-use technologies at unprecedented levels due to rising military spending and demand for autonomous systems and deployable battlefield technologies.
- Israeli startups star in “TIME” list of 2026’s best inventions – SpotitEarly, Beewise , and Bria AI made the TIME list.
GLOBAL
- The 2026 American Dynamism 50 is here: our annual list of 50 companies, from within the a16z portfolio and beyond, building for America’s future by Andreessen Horowitz
- The Fortune Cyber 60 – 60 of the most important venture-backed cybersecurity startups that have not completed an IPO, acquisition, or other significant exit according to Lightspeed and Fortune (the list is full of Israeli startups)
- No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector – Big survey by Apollo Global Management, Inc. shows: companies have given everyone chatbots and run a bunch of pilots, but don’t really see any impact on the bottom line from AI yet.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Israeli tech recorded 55 exit transactions in Q3/2026, bringing the year-to-date total to 138, nearly matching the 140 exits recorded during all of 2024, according to IVC Data and Insights . Q3 exits generated $5.5 billion, while total exit value since the beginning of 2026 reached $81 billion, largely driven by major acquisitions earlier in the year (source)
Startup nation vs. scale up nation – what would it take? Only 1% of Israeli startups get to have 500 employees 10 years from inception. But is the number of employees the right measure in the age of AI? (source)
Don’t go chasing unicorns – a first of its kind ranking, Unitard. io tracked what happened to companies after receiving the coveted status – the results may surprise you. Explore the Unitard Club.
What would it take to bring full autonomy to robotics? 1) Reasoning autonomy: how much a robot can figure out on its own. 2) Charge autonomy: how long it can keep working without a dock or a human to stay powered. Landscape by Montauk Capital
The American Dynamism 50 by A16Z (source in the links section)
35 startups building the stuff of science fiction. A fun landscape by CB Insights
Google is down 11% today (representing a $500 billion market cap hit) and despite nearly doubling cloud business in Q3 2026
Where does the AI spending go? research by Social Capital (source)
Finally, we bid farewell yesterday to Captain Picard, Prof Xavier and the legend that was Patrick Stewart. May his memory be a blessing.
That’s all for this week. A political deadlock can make it feel as though everything is stuck. The people building companies remind us that progress still happens through thousands of individual decisions: hiring someone, helping a customer, making an introduction, or backing an idea before it is obvious. Take a moment to give someone a little firgun. It costs nothing, and it can mean a great deal.
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 – October 30 2026 - October 30, 2026
- From Startup Nation to Scale-up Nation: Israel’s Next Growth Challenge - October 26, 2026
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – October 23 2026 - October 23, 2026
Sources
- Intel to buy quantum firm Classiq for about $2.3 billion, Bloomberg News reports
- Upwind expands funding round to $400 million at $3.8 billion valuation
- Bites raises $40 million Series A to bring AI training to frontline workers
- Freshworks acquires Robusta
- Cash is king as investors draw new battle lines in AI spending boom
