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The word “Firgun” (Hebrew: ??????/ pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is an informal modern Hebrew term and concept in Israeli culture (originally Yiddish), which describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other person. It’s the opposite of “schadenfreude”. Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for someone else’s accomplishments, good fortune, or well-being. More about Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
I landed this morning from a few days in Singapore. It’s impressive to see what the self described ‘little red dot’ accomplished in its 65 years of independence and I couldn’t avoid comparing and contrasting to Israel. While no politics was discussed on the trip, it inspired me about being purposeful as a nation when it comes to health, education, investment, climate etc and incentivising the best people to go into civil service.
293 days passed since October 7th. 115 Israeli hostages remain in G*z*. This week, 5 bodies were recovered by the IDF. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME, every last one of the hostages, NOW.
In the tech world, Israeli startup Wiz turned down the $23 billion acquisition offer from Google and opted for going public instead. It’s a bold move, but many believe that it’s better for the industry.
The CrowdStrike global outage is estimated to have cost Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn. OpenAI is going head to head with Google with a new search product called SearchGPT. To add more heat, Microsoft launched generative AI search results for Bing. Mistral AI released two new open-source LLM models (Nemo in partnership with NVIDIA) and Large 2. AI at Meta launched LLaMa 3.1, the most powerful open source LLM to date. Developers can fine-tune, distill and deploy it anywhere. Stability AI released Video4D, a multi angle video generation model, and Kling, the Chinese competitor of Sora is now publicly available.
Good luck to all the Israeli athletes representing the country in the 2024 Paris Olympics, amid threats and protests.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Don’t count the days, make the days count” – Muhammad Ali
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congrats David Israeli, MD and team Magenta Medical Ltd. on the $105M series E to create the world’s smartest heart pump!
- Great news Merav Bahat and team Dazz on your $50M series B to accelerate AI-powered cloud security remediation!
- Kol hakavod Itai Hayut and team Scopio Labs on securing a $42M series D for for AI-based blood cell analysis!
- Big respect Moshiel Biton and team Addionics on your $39M series B for your cost-effective and high-performance batteries to power the future of EVs!
- Impressive news Shely Aronov and team InnerPlant on your $30M series B for your plant DNA implantation to improve distress signalling!
- Congratulations Israel Duanis and team Linx Security on coming out of stealth with a $27M series A (and previously undisclosed $6M seed round) for your identity security platform!
- Exciting milestone Dan Deviri and team CarbonBlue on raising a $10M seed round for your water based carbon removal (CDR) technology!
- Mazel tov Snir Ben Shimol and team ZEST Security on securing a $5M seed round for your cloud risk resolution platform!
- Good job Amiad Solomon and team HQ on the undisclosed strategic round to power enterprise travel programs!
EXITS
- Well done Elad Tsur and team Planck on the $300M acquisition by Applied Systems!
- Kudos Dan Brahmy and team Cyabra on agreeing to merge with a SPAC that will take the company public in NASDAQ at a market cap of $70M!
- Way to go Ofer Yourvexel and team Pepperi – Unified B2B Commerce Platform on the acquisition by Advantive for an undisclosed sum!
APPOINTMENTS
- Mazel tov Nadav Zafrir on being named the new CEO of Check Point Software!
- Congratulations Barrel Kfir on joining Dell Technologies Capital as partner, focusing on early stage enterprise tech in Europe and Israel! We are next door neighbours in our Remagine Ventures Tel Aviv office!
- Kudos Eyal Azoulay on joining Entrée Capital as the newest partner!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
Israel:
- Regulatory risk was a factor in Wiz-Google deal cancellation
- Iranian hackers threaten Israeli athletes at Paris Olympics in new cyber campaign
- Mapping Israel defense tech landscape
Global:
- European VCs outperform US VCs over 10 and 15 year horizons
- State of startup compensation report H1 2024 from Carta
- 2024 tech trends report by McKinsey & Company
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The Israeli Defence tech landscape was added to my collection on VC Cafe (see here)
Old but gold. 608 (27%) out of 2,321 unicorn founders with data on an undergraduate degree received it outside the US. The top 3 universities who produced these founders are Israeli: Tel Aviv University , Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, according to research by Ilya Strebulaev
Viola fintech financial institutions trust report (source)
Big number. More data created in last 3 years than in all of history, according to Blackstone.
The US currently has more than 2.5x the data center capacity of Europe, and record amounts of data center capacity is being built in the US so that gap will widen. Europe is definitely more than a few years behind on that.
The AI Agent and automation startup landscape by Insight Partners (source)
The new open source LLM LLaMa 3.1 by Meta is the latest climax in the open vs. closed debate in AI and foundational models (source) – the model exceeds Claude 3.5 and GPT-4o in some instances
The IPO window visualised
Shocking (or not). US video blogger Zach Sage Fox went to the West Bank to interview members of the public. (He’s been getting threats ever since publishing this video)
That’s all for this week. Thank you for reading. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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