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If you’re new here, 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” (which stands for being happy for someone else’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for members of our community’s accomplishments, good fortune and wins. More about Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
With phase 1 of the ceasefire now complete, the fate of the remaining h**tages in G**a remains uncertain. We know of approximately 22 living Israelis, held by Ha**s against their will (out of a total of 59 host**es remaining there. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME NOW.
In the wider tech world, Anthropic has released the market’s first hybrid reasoning model Claude 3.7 which reportedly cost “a few tens of millions of dollars” to train, similar to Claude 3.5 and cheaper than GPT-4, which cost over $100M. Anthropic also launched Claude Code, their first agentic coding tool and is wrapping up a $3.5 billion round at a $61 billion valuation. Calude 3.7 OpenAI launches GPT-4.5, its “most knowledgeable model yet” in research preview (aimed at improving writing)- the company has projected its cash burn to hit ~$20B in 2027. Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled Ocelot, its new quantum chip built in partnership with Caltech, featuring five qubits that store data and four additional qubits to detect errors. Microsoft unveiled the 3.8B-parameter text-only Phi-4-mini and 5.6B-parameter Phi-4-multimodal, claiming both outperform similar-sized models in certain tasks. DeepSeek AI sparked a nationwide push in China to deploy its LLMs everywhere from hospitals to local governments. Mira Murati’s Thinking Machine Labs said to raise $1B at $9B valuation. Perplexity is launching its own $50m VC fund. A new foundation model called Magma, claims to be the first for multimodal AI agents. Also, NVIDIA released a foundation model for molecular biology. ElevenLabs launched its own speech to text model. Amazon launched Alexa+, an AI makeover of its home assistant. Alibaba Group has just released Wan2.1, a family of open-source AI video models designed to generate high-quality images and videos from text and image inputs. Meanwhile, Veo 2, Google‘s text to video model will cost 50 cents per second. More than 1 billion people every month check out podcasts on YouTube. A moment in the Creator Economy: MrBeast is in talks to raise funding at a $5 billion valuation.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
— C.S. Lewis
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Huge congrats Itamar Sivan, Ph.D. – WE ARE H-I-R-I-N-G and team Quantum Machines on the impressive $170M series C (at $700M valuation), the largest round to date for a quantum computing company!
- Big thumbs up Doron Merdinger and team Doroni Aerospace on your $30M series A to bring flying cars closer to reality!
- Kol ha kavod Eylon Etshtein ?? and team GoPerfect on your $23M seed round to transform talent sourcing and engagement platform with AI!
- Kudos Iftach Ian Amit and team Gomboc AI on your $13M seed round to eliminate the security backlog that delays critical business transformation!
- Well done Erez Agmon and team Vayu on your $7M seed round to redefine billing and revenue management with AI!
- Way to go Hanan Iserovich and team ActualSignal on your undisclosed seed round to minimise the frequency and duration of hospitalisations for Parkinson patients.
EXITS
- Big congrats Danel Mayer and team EndoStream Medical on the $100M acquisition of your implant to help treat cerebrovascular diseases by Japan’s KANEKA CORPORATION.
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- An interesting report and survey of 25 early stage venture funds in Israel (including us at Remagine Ventures) shows the major trends in pre-seed and seed. I wrote about the major takeaways on VC Cafe and you can access the report by F2 Venture Capital here.
- Ori Goshen of AI21 Labs reveals what is broken in Enterprise AI and what’s needed for the next phase.
- Gigi Levy-Weiss predicts that the next 10 years will be all about the AI Agent Economy
GLOBAL
- Accelerating Europe report (part 1 of 3) by Dealroom.co puts the spotlight on the reasons to be optimistic about the continent’s future tech potential. Lots of data here.
- The state of mobile in Q4 2024 report by Sensor Tower reveals that TikTok is the first mobile app to hit $6B in annual consumer spending.
- Ten principles for building strong vertical AI businesses, by Bessemer Venture Partners
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Cybersecurity and vertical AI deemed highest potential areas of investment by 25 early stage Israeli VCs in latest report (source)
One of the big problems of venture capital these days is the lack of liquidity. Part of the reason is that big tech is not acquiring as many startups as before.
Superagency in the workplace – how gen AI capabilities have evolved in the past two years by McKinsey & Company (source)
We’re getting closer to the 1 employee unicorn? here are the Unicorns with the fewest employees
Investment framework for AI startups according to Bessemer Venture Partners
The product strategy sprint for startups by Lenny Rachitsky (source)
The top 50 generative AI use cases in marketing (source)
The Music AI startup landscape by Cherie Hu (source)
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.
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