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
It’s hard not to get emotional seeing the reunion of the Israeli ho****es that have returned with their families. It’s also hard to ignore the staging that has been set up as they are handed to the Red Cross. Israel receives people who were kidnapped from their homes, including 80 year old Gadi Mozes, or 29 year old Arbel Yehud, who was kidnapped from her home and kept mostly alone in tunnels in return to hundreds of convicted te****ists who committed heinous crimes. It’s not rocket science to see that it’s a pretty bad deal. But I’m grateful for every Israeli that is returned safely. We must not forget them and #BRINGTHEMHOME, all of them.
There’s a saying that goes like this “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. That would be an accurate description of the past week. From Stargate being announced as the new “Apollo” program in the US with an expected $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the coming years (Trump’s first press conference of his tenure, which shows how much of a priority AI takes in this administration), to the explosion of DeepSeek AI, a Chinese ‘reasoning’ LLM which exceeded OpenAI‘s o1 model at 3-5% of the cost. A visual model from the same company was also said to exceed Dall-e 3. Deepseek became the most downloaded app in the US overnight. The Deepseek news saw $1 trillion erased from the US stock market (NVIDIA alone shed $600 billion of market cap, the largest ever drop in a single day in US history). Another Chinese company, Alibaba Group introduced, Qwen2.5-Max, performing advanced reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing infrastructure costs by up to 60%.
The news on the much cheaper, equally or more efficient Chinese models caused a huge amount of speculation: Is AI a bubble? Did Deepseek really manage to achieve this with $5M? Could more resources and top-tier hardware mean AGI is just around the corner? The truth will take time to percolate, Deepseek claimed they used only 5,000 GPUs- and old ones at that and the real number is estimated at 50,000 (it’s being investigated if the chips were acquired in Singapore, side-stepping the export ban to China). Later in the week it was revealed that Deepseek has likely copied code and data from ChatGPT, is most likely passing all the usage data to China and as a result it’s has already been banned by several organisations and governments (Italy, US for starters).
AI is having its moment. Global AI funding surged past the $100B mark for the first time ever in 2024 and just by this week’s announcements, it’s more than likely that will at least double that amount in 2025. OpenAI launched “Operator”, its first AI agent that is capable to complete tasks autonomously by browsing the Internet and ChatGPT Gov launched with 18M+ prompts from 90K government users. OpenAI announced it will be raising another $40 billion at a whooping $340 billion valuation. Meta hit the panic button and set up several war rooms to dissect Deepseek. Zuckerberg said it will continue investing in AI with intense CAPEX, adding $65bn into AI development. Pika launched its new video model, 2.1, with 1080p resolution and improved human characters. Google launched Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Model and quietly announced its next flagship model, Gemini 2.0 pro experimental. Samsung Electronics launched an XR headset with Google to rival the Apple Vision Pro. ElevenLabs, the voice cloning AI startup, tripled its value in one year to $3.3 billion as it raised $250M series C led by A16Z. Boom Supersonic, a startup that aims to build the successor to Concorde, broke the sound barrier in a historic test flight.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“There are moments in history when everything changes. We call them revolutions.” —Yuval Noah Harari
NEW VENTURE DEALS
- Awesome news Avi Meir and team TravelPerk on your latest $200M raise at a $2.7 billion valuation (2x the previous round) to continue scaling your corporate travel management platform!
- Congratulations Nadav Czerninski and team Oligo Security on securing a $50M series B for your application detection and response cybersecurity tech!
- Kudos Amir Hever and team UVeye on raising $41M in new equity funding (in addition to $150M in debt) to scale your AI powered vehicle inspection systems!
- Way to go Roi Ravhon and team Finout and raising a $40M series C for your financial operations platform for businesses!
- Good stuff Noa Shelach and team Lutris Pharma on raising a $30M series B to improve anti-cancer therapies by reducing cutaneous dose-limiting toxicity!
- Well done Ilan Yeshua and team Seraphic Security on securing a $29 million Series A to transform any browser into a secure one!
- Good on you Rom Lakritz and team Anchor on raising a $20M series A for your automated invoice management and collection platform!
- Congrats Ofir Har-Chen and team Clutch Security on raising a $20M series A for your non-human identity security platform!
- Mazel tov Itamar Apelblat and team Token Security on your $20M series A to help enterprises secure their machine identities!
- Fantastic milestone Maor Goldberg and team Backline AI on raising a $9M seed round for your an autonomous security remediation platform!
- Big congrats Guy Eisenkot and team Baz on coming out of stealth with an $8M seed round for your AI Code Reviewer!
- Kol hakavod Gal Aga and team Aligned on raising an $8M series A to help sales teams bring automation to the enterprise sales process!
- Keep up the good work Roy Sheinfeld and team Breez and congrats on your $5M raise to accelerate global Bitcoin payments adoption!
- Big thumbs up Naama Manova-Twito and team MarkeTeam.ai on raising $3M for your workplace, autonomous AI agents!
- Last but not least, well done Yosi Sabag and team Bitstock | TBC on raising $400,000 to help consumers buy crypto!
EXITS
- Big congrats Yaniv Bar-Dayan and team Vulcan Cyber | Own exposure risk on the acquisition by Tenable for a reported $150M!
- Mazal tov ??Shira Shamban and team Solvo on the acquisition by CYE for an undisclosed sum!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- We released a massive resource of 80+ 2025 trend and forecast reports across categories, via the Remagine Ventures newsletter. You can find the link (and subscribe) here.
- Beating China at their own game: Why DeepSeek is great news for Israeli tech – by Calcalist ???????
- The new space economy is projected to reach $1 trillion by 2040. A new report by Startup Nation Central shines a light on 104 Israeli startups operating in the space tech ecosystem.
- Bonus: Israeli startup PLAYO.AI Introduces Click-to-Game AI Technology That Creates Playable 3-D Games in Under a Minute (disclosure: it’s one of our portfolio companies at Remagine Ventures)
- Wiz Research Uncovers Exposed DeepSeek Database Leaking Sensitive Information, Including Chat History
GLOBAL
- Ten principles for building strong vertical AI businesses – by Bessemer Venture Partners
- Interesting slide deck by Evan Shap?ro on the state of US media after tech disruption.
- Deepseek: Innovation or overhype? by Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic and What did DeepSeek figure out about reasoning with DeepSeek-R1? by Sean Goedecke from GitHub.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
I would argue that China should be much higher on this list following the past week events, but according to this study by StartupBlink Israel rank’s second globally in AI.
The Israeli space tech startup landscape, featuring 104 startups in key areas of development, including satellite communications, space exploration, and related technologies has been added to my 2025 Israeli startup landscape collection on VC Cafe
From 2014 to 2024, local tech gaming companies raised $3 billion in 464 deals. Gaming exits totalled $10. 9 billion in 60 deals. However, since the height of Covid, funding for Israeli gaming startups has declined at a rapid clip. At Remagine Ventures we are actively looking for pre-seed Israeli gaming startups – reach out to us!
It’s getting increasingly difficult to raise a Series A round, and—consequently—startups are stuck in seed for longer.
DeepSeek just released another open-source model that beats DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion. Janus-Pro is a unified understanding and generation MLLM. It decouples visual encoding for multimodal understanding and generation. It’s available for free download.
Until now, the majority of investment and VC profit in generative AI was at the infrastructure level. One thing to consider, is wether the launch of Deepseek R1, and other less expensive models that are open source and can run locally, mean that now is the time of the application layer to shine?
The 5 levels of AI agent evolution, by NFX (source)
Using the label “AI” has no significant impact on users’ willingness to pay and trust according to a study by Irrational Labs (source)
Voice AI Agents market map by A16 – New Andreessen Horowitz thesis – an update on Voice AI
Global AI funding surged past the $100B mark for the first time ever in 2024.
AI is driving a funding frenzy in the private markets GP Bullhound
Finally, no words needed here.
That’s all for this week. 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.
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – February 28, 2025 - February 28, 2025
- Israel’s Pre-seed 2024 Report and 2025 Sentiment - February 25, 2025
- Weekly Firgun Newsletter – February 21 2025 - February 21, 2025
