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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
Eli Sharabi, an Israeli who spent over 500 days hostage, starved, beaten and had his wife and daughters killed on October 7th, visited the White House this week with other former hostages and their family members. It’s inspiring how a person who’ve been through so much, and lost the people closest to him, can find the energies to fight for those who can’t fend for themselves. There are still 59 Israelis held in G**a in terrible conditions. 23 are believed to be alive. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME NOW ??
Israeli tech funding remained stable in February, with 25 startups raising a total of $588 million and two new unicorns minted: Dream and Augury. A new report published by IVC Data and Insights showed that it’s the investors, not the startups, who are being challenged: VC fundraising is at a decade low, having just $922 million in dry powder in 2024. I’ll just echo folks like Bill Ackman, Safra Katz or Juan Delgado-Moreira – “Now is the best time to invest in Israel“.
It’s been another packed week in the AI and wider tech world. Mistral AI launched Mistral OCR, a new API designed for document understanding. Google has introduced AI Mode, an experimental feature in its Search platform, aimed at handling complex and open-ended queries. OpenAI’s ChatGPT macOS app now supports direct code editing within integrated development environments (IDEs). The company is toying a Phd level AI Agent that will cost $20,000 a month. Microsoft has introduced Dragon Copilot, an AI assistant designed for healthcare professionals as well as AI agents for sales to take on Salesforce. Tencent‘s HunyuanVideo I2V Model extends their text-to-video model to image-to-video generation. Alibaba Group‘s Qwen team has released QwQ-32B, an open-source AI model designed for advanced reasoning tasks. Sesame has introduced hyper-realistic AI voice models, Maya and Miles, under their Conversational Speech Model (CSM). Anthropic has just raised $3.5bn in a round at a post-money valuation of $61.5bn. Firefly Aerospace‘s Blue Ghost has become the first commercial spacecraft to successfully land on our Moon. T-Mobile and Perplexity are teaming up on an AI phone. Taiwan’s TSMC announced $100 billion investment in US chipmaking And finally, RIP Skype.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Don’t count the days, make the days count”
– Muhammad Ali
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Dor G. and team Grain on coming out of stealth with $50M in funding ($33M series A and previously undisclosed seed) to help any business hedge against FX volatility!
- Well done Erez Druk and team Freed on your $30M series A for your AI agent for clinicians!
- Kudos Mor Peretz and team CaPow on your $15M series A to help robot companies with your wireless charging technology that eliminates downtime and boosts fleet efficiency!
- Way to go Gadi Evron and team Knostic on securing an $11M series A round to help enterprises adopt AI tools without worrying about data leaks!
- Great stuff Ron Arbel and team Aryon Security on coming out of stealth with $9M in seed funding to proactively prevent cloud risks, before they emerge!
- Kol hakavod Stav Levi Neumark and team Alta on coming out of stealth with a $7M seed round to bring AI-driven sales agents to market!
- Mazal tov Orly Shoavi and team ClarityQ GenAI Product Analytics on emerging from stealth with a $3.7M seed round to apply AI to digital product usage analysis!
EXITS
- Congratulations Tomaso Zambelli, Raymond W. Cohen and team SoniVie Ltd on your $360M acquisition by Boston Scientific
- Kudos Daniel Bren and team OTORIO on the $120M acquisition by Armis of your cybersecurity solutions for critical infrastructure!
- Well done Roee Kriger and team Metis on getting acquired by Dynatrace for an estimated price of tens of millions to help companies reimagine how they build their data infrastructure!
NEW APPOINTMENTS
- Big congrats Iren Reznikov on joining Vintage Investment Partners as a Partner!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- The state of women in tech 2025 – a report by the Israel Innovation Authority
- The Israel 2024 investors report – by Gornitzky GNY, KPMG and IVC Data and Insights
- Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence eyes $2B funding as Israeli team quietly grows – by Calcalist ???????
GENERAL
- Beyond Foundation models – my post on VC Cafe on the commoditisation of foundation models and what comes next (AI Agents, Vertical AI and AI apps)
- The top 100 GenAI consumer apps – by Andreessen Horowitz (related – A16Z made 7 investments in Israel in 2024, including our Remagine Ventures portfolio company, Keewano)
- ???? ?????? = ??? ?????? – by Y Combinator – YC on AI-first software development (for 25% of the startups in the current YC batch, 95% of the code is AI generated!)
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The state of women in tech in 2025 – The number of female students in STEM degrees has doubled in a decade, outpacing male growth 3:1 and there are More women in core tech roles – The number of women in R&D has grown 140% in 10 years. But there’s still a lot of work to do. Check out the report by Israel Innovation Authority here
Israeli VC capital raising hit a decade low in 2024, according to a new IVC Data and Insights report, but startups were not affected yet in 2024, raising over $10 billion (source)
Israel’s AI21 Labs released a new version of Jamba model and it’s the best performing model for private deployment
As of March 2025, there are 1,446 active unicorns globally, with $868.4B in funding and a combined valuation of $4.6T.
Startup funding -20% YoY to $19.3B in Feb, U.S. leads with 54% of global VC investment
Small checks matter in SAFE rounds, according to Carta (I agree!)
The AI Agent stack by Jon Turow and Madrona (source)
Economies of scale. Stripe has processed over $1 trillion in payments in 2024. I recommend reading the company’s annual letter (source)
The Quantum Computing landscape by APEX Ventures (source)
The top 50 AI apps by monthly active users, by Andreessen Horowitz (source)
I could go on but 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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