Key takeaways
- Israeli founders attracted backing across cybersecurity, enterprise AI, defence, water conservation and marine technology, with announcements from Covenant, Cylake, WINT, Cymphony, Euno and HydroSight.
- Bonfy.AI’s acquisition by Kiteworks and Scanovate’s deal with Prytek highlight continued demand for Israeli security and digital identity technology.
- Globally, AI funding and infrastructure spending accelerated, while new products and acquisitions intensified competition across software, chips and creative tools.
It’s #Firgun time!
The original version of this newsletter was published on Linkedin to 8,400+ subscribers.
Firgun is the Hebrew word for taking genuine pleasure in someone else’s success. Every week since March 2020, we’ve made time to celebrate the people building, creating and moving our startup community forward. If this was forwarded to you, you can find previous editions on VC Cafe.
As we gather for Rosh Hashanah, I’m entering the new year with hope for Israel and for our community. There is something inherently optimistic about starting a company: committing years of your life to something that doesn’t exist yet, and convincing others to help you build it. Every week, this newsletter offers reminders of that belief in the future, through founders taking another leap, teams reaching a milestone and people opening doors for one another. This week brought investment in everything from enterprise AI and cybersecurity to water conservation and understanding the seabed, alongside exits built on years of patient work. My wish for the year ahead is that we have more room to create, more reasons to celebrate and more time with the people we love. May it bring health, healing, security and peace, and may we keep showing up for each other. ??? ???? ??????!
Today also marks 25 years since the September 11 attacks. We remember the lives lost, the families whose worlds changed forever, and the extraordinary courage of those who rushed to help. As this anniversary coincides with the start of Rosh Hashanah, we hold remembrance alongside hope, wishing for a year of greater compassion, healing and peace.
In the wider tech world, DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Images 2.5 and ChatGPT for Financial Services, and Meta joined the AI assistant race by launchin Muse, its personal AI agent. Apple unveiled its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo which will be out in October for min $2,000, while Suno launched v6 with music-industry partners and Universal Music Group teamed up with ElevenLabs on a licensed AI music platform. Infrastructure spending kept climbing: Google committed €13 billion to Finland, including nuclear power, and Microsoft reportedly plans to more than triple its data-centre capacity by 2032. Mega-rounds included Mistral’s €3 billion at a €21 billion valuation, Cognition’s $2 billion at $48 billion, Harvey’s $550 million and Positron AI’s $875 million at $5 billion. In M&A, Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro for a reported $1.36 billion (it was valued at $17.9B in 2022), Analog Devices agreed to acquire Alif Semiconductor for $1.35 billion plus potential additional payments, and Salesforce reportedly held talks to buy Listen Labs for around $2 billion. Alongside the commercial momentum, Anthropic’s report on disrupted AI misuse underscored the growing challenge of keeping increasingly capable agents under control.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Hope is the belief that if we work hard enough together, we can make things better.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
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NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
Announcements published since the September 4 edition. Cumulative funding disclosures are identified separately from individual rounds.
- Huge congratulations to Michael Kaufman and the Covenant team on emerging from stealth with more than $250 million raised across three rounds, to build lower-cost, long-range defence systems! The latest round reportedly valued the company above $1 billion!
- Mazal tov to Nir Zuk, Ehud S. and the Cylake team on securing $245 million funding round to build an AI security platform for organisations that need to retain control of their data and infrastructure!
- Kudos to Alon Geva a and the Wint Water Intelligence team on raising a $36 million Series D to detect water waste and prevent costly leaks in buildings using AI!
- Way to go Elad Schulman and team Lasso on a strategic $30M round of funding to scale Leap, is a transformer-free guardrail that runs entirely on ordinary server processors, with zero GPUs required!
- Congratulations to Shy Dekel and the Cymphony team on raising a $25 million Series A to help enterprises secure the access and actions of employees and AI agents!
- Well done to Sarah Levy and the Euno team on raising a $23 million Series A to give enterprise AI agents the organisational knowledge they need to work reliably!
- Kol hakavod to Tomer Adler and the HydroSight team on emerging from stealth with a $5 million seed round to turn marine survey data into actionable intelligence about the seabed!
EXITS
- Big congratulations to Gidi Cohen, Danny Kibel and the Bonfy.AI, a Kiteworks company team on their acquisition by Kiteworks , bringing real-time protection of sensitive information into its enterprise data security platform! Terms were undisclosed; CTech estimates the deal at tens of millions of dollars.
- Mabruk to Amir Fishman, Roy Fishman, Irad Gilboa and the Scanovate team, on the acquisition of their activities by Prytek, in a transaction valued at approximately $50 million in its first phase! A significant milestone for a bootstrapped business helping financial institutions manage digital identity and customer onboarding!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES / VC CAFE / ISRAEL VC
- AI Assistants want to own the work we delegate – My look at the competition to become our personal and team AI assistants, and what it takes to earn the right to act on our behalf, including Instinct, Town and others
- Stripe’s $8 Billion OpenRouter Bet: Who Owns the Economics of AI? My analysis this week of the previously announced acquisition, and why AI usage, billing and margins are becoming inseparable.
- My impressions from the Israel Innovation day at the London Stock Exchange, the day after a low point in the relationship between the two countries…
ISRAEL
- Israel’s AI industry attracted $11.8 billion in 2025 – A report covered this week puts AI at 89% of Israeli high-tech investment last year, with nearly 3,000 AI companies active. These are 2025 investment figures, not this year’s total.
- The TLV AI 50 – A useful look at the people behind Israel’s contribution to the next wave of AI by TLV Partners
- There is $8.07 available for investments to Israeli startups – the H1 2026 investors report by IVC Data and Insights
GLOBAL
- Introducing AlphaGenome Atlas – Google DeepMind’s resource for exploring how changes in DNA could affect gene regulation.
- Anthropic’s September threat intelligence report – Concrete examples of attempted misuse and the company’s interventions, useful context for anyone building agent products.
- Investors spend 4 minutes per pitch deck on average – Papermark Startup Fundraising report. How investors actually read your pitch deck, measured across 24,541 decks, 358,672 investor views and the rounds that closed afterwards.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
FDI In Israel: 90% from the USA – In 2025, the United States investments in Israel accounted for nearly 90% of all FDI.
Moonshot capitalism: AI rewrites the venture capital playbook (by Financial Times)
Every $100M+ funding round in Europe – 2026 YTD – by Dealroom.co (source)
Related: the European Diaspora Index. European founders have built $1.8 trillion of unicorn value outside Europe. It covers 416 unicorns with at least one founder who grew up in Europe, including Stripe, Hugging Face, Snowflake, Datadog, Miro, Grammarly, and more. by Dealroom.co
The Market map for AI assistants by Lightspeed India (source)
The physical AI market map by defy.vc (source)
According to The Economist, AI has created 1 million new jobs in the U.S in 2025
The humanoid robot value chain (source)
An incredible drone show in New York, in honour of the 2,977 victims who were murdered that day.
Shana tova u metukah from all of us at the Remagine Ventures team ??
That’s all for this week. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Wishing you and your loved ones a sweet, healthy and peaceful new year. 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 – September 11 2026 - September 11, 2026
- AI Assistants want to own the work we delegate - September 8, 2026
- Stripe’s $8 Billion OpenRouter Bet: Who Owns the Economics of AI? - September 7, 2026
