Editor’s Pick / venture capital
Europe’s defense spending boom is opening new markets for Israeli startups. Kevin Baxpehler, co-founder of Remagine Ventures, explores where demand is growing, why Germany matters, and how European partnerships can help founders…
Read the analysis ?
Europe’s defense spending boom is opening new markets for Israeli startups. Kevin Baxpehler, co-founder of Remagine Ventures, explores where demand is growing, why Germany matters, and how European partnerships can help founders compete in defense and critical infrastructure resilience.
The latest #FIRGUN is live: huge Israeli funding rounds, startups emerging from stealth, and a reported $150M–$200M for a cybersecurity startup that hasn’t even started yet. ? Plus Jensen’s departure from NVIDIA, Anthropic’s IPO ambitions, two new Israeli startup landscapes and more.
AI safety has professional champions on every side, with funding, careers and commercial interests shaping the debate. From a venture investor’s perspective, how do we separate evidence from advocacy, assess the trade-offs and identify where Israeli startups can contribute?
AI agents can send our emails, spend our money and act in our name. But can we reconstruct what they did, who authorised it and where things went wrong? From the Hugging Face breach to a possible agentic bank run, the challenge is keeping control as we delegate more.
AI now leads a quarter of Anthropic’s own R&D, and an independent review finds its progress running at nearly twice its earlier pace. What does that feedback loop mean for the speed of AI, for oversight, and for where startups can build?
The mid term US elections had an impact on the markets, Israeli teams raised $150 million to secure enterprise data and $15 million to test cyber defences. Plus TailorMed’s $250 million deal, the tech verdict from the US midterms and Sequoia’s retreat from London.
What would happen if your business suddenly lost access to OpenAI and Anthropic? AI sovereignty exposes a deeper infrastructure question, spanning compute, networking, storage, databases and agent operations. Israel’s startups are building across this stack, creating an opportunity that extends well beyond frontier models.
Sequoia’s London closure is an unwelcome signal for European tech, but its history in Israel suggests a more nuanced story. From a16z’s withdrawal to Benchmark Europe’s evolution into Balderton, the lasting impact depends on the investments, relationships and independent firms that follow.
YC’s Winter 2027 requests point towards the practical work of deploying AI. Alongside original publications from Pear, a16z, Menlo and QED, they offer a useful guide to investor interest and a starting point for founders’ customer research.
Israeli deep-tech companies are attracting ambitious funding and delivering significant exits. From quantum computing to autonomous driving, their stories highlight five questions founders still need to address about their team, customers, economics, traction and funding milestones.
A political deadlock, a reported $2.3 billion quantum deal and another wave of AI mega-rounds. This week’s #FIRGUN celebrates Israeli founders building through uncertainty, with fresh funding for Upwind and Bites and new chapters for NeuReality and Robusta.
What does it mean to become a scale-up when AI allows smaller teams to build bigger businesses? Reflections from the Scaleup event at Reichman University on defensibility, talent and what Israel needs to build its next generation of global companies.
Weekly Firgun Newsletter
Join founders and investors reading the weekly Firgun newsletter by Eze Vidra.
