The original version of this newsletter was published on Linkedin.
The word “Firgun” (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’m sharing this edition of #Firgun from a plane. I was in Helsinki this week and met a great number of European and US VCs, LPs and founders. I’m not sure if it has to do with me, but refreshingly, Israel didn’t come up at all apart from the occasional question of how’s my family. It’s a great reminder that to heal, and move forward, we must adopt a ‘business as usual’ approach. Keep building, investing and planning for a better future. It’s also a reminder that we’re all in this together. We have to support each other and don’t forget that there’s people that need our help. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME
In the wider tech world, Microsoft turned 50 this week, xAI raised another $6 billion (at a $50 billion valuation) to compete with ChatGPT, Databricks is looking to raise $8 billion to buy employee stock, Google will likely have to divest of Chrome following the DOJ decision to curb monopoly, NVIDIA has doubled its revenue over the past year (but growth slowed), Apple is working on ‘Siri LLM’ to compete with ChatGPT, Bluesky Social, the Xitter competitor gained 1m users last week and reached 20M users. Chinese LLMs are getting better and Deepseek AI launched a new model that can ‘reason’ which is on par with OpenAI o1-preview. @perple VC returns can only go up (I hope) as 2023 VCs eturned the lowest level of capital to their investors since 2011.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man”
George Bernard Shaw
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Yotam Segev and team Cyera on your impressive $300M series D, doubling the company’s value to $3 billion to be the Crowstrike of data security!
- Mazel tov Israel (Srulik) Dvorsky and team TailorMed on securing a $40M to connect patients with financial aid solutions!
- Well done Assaf Rappaport and team Wiz on your undisclosed round of funding to continue the journey of as the fastest growing Israeli startup in history!
- Way to go Itamar Golan and team Prompt Security on your $18M series A to help companies secure their generative AI tools!
- Kudos Yehuda Niv and team Spines on your $16.5M series A to help authors self-publish their books with the help of AI!
- Great milestone Dvir Hoffman and team CommBox on your $15M series B to build the future of customer experience powered by AI!
- Thumbs up Benny Porat and team Twine Security on coming out of stealth with a $12M seed round to automate security tasks starting with identity management!
- Kol hakavod Liav Georgy and team Oraqon on securing a $10M seed round for a very secret defence tech product related to sensors (stay tuned for more)
- Excellent news Dov Gertz and team Converge Bio on your $5.5M seed round to accelerate drug discovery and development with AI!
- Good stuff Rohi Hourvitz and team FertilAI on securing a $4.5M seed round to scale your AI-powered clinical decision support tools for fertility!
EXITS
- Impressive exit Merav Bahat and team Dazz on the $450M acquisition by Wiz to expand their AI automated cloud security!
- Kudos Zvika Netter and team Innovid on the acquisition by Mediaocean for a reported $500M that takes the company private again!
- Not all exits are happy, but nevertheless a result. Congrats Lior Div and team Cybereason on the merger with Trustwave,
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire on why the venture capital fund has resumed operations in Israel since the start of the war, after closing its office here in 2016.
- Oracle CEO Safra Catz: “Israel will be flooded with investments after the war“
- Podcast: Building Wiz, the fastest growing startup in history – by Lenny Rachitsky
- BONUS: Israel’s tech AI ecosystem report by Startup Nation Central
GLOBAL
- State of corporate venture capital report by SVB
- The state of Generative AI in the Enterprise by Menlo Ventures
- AI Eats the world presentation – by Benedict Evans
- BONUS: “Breaking the mold: Pattern Breakers book review” – by me on VC Cafe
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
AI startups demonstrated greater resilience compared to non-AI counterparts
The number of active AI companies saw a remarkable increase of over 170%, rising from 783 companies in 2014 to 2170 in 2023, while the number of non-AI companies grew by only 12%. In 2018 the number of active non-AI companies reached its peak and then started to descend. At the same time, active AI companies continued to grow, reaching a peak in 2022.
SAFE is king. Nearly 90% of Q3 2024 seed rounds were done using SAFEs (source Carta)
CVCs are obsessed with AI. Asia continues to be the largest market for CVC investment, accounting for 39% of all deals. by SVB
Modern AI stack – the emerging building blocks for AI
Aerospace and defence market map (source)
The new unicorns of 2024 so far
My first Slush is a wrap. Small Israeli presence but large US presence of LPs and GPs. Read my takeaways.
That’s all for this week, thanks 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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