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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
Today we celebrate “Purim”, another Jewish holiday celebrating another foiled attempt to kill our people (joking, kind of). In Purim the custom is to put on fancy dress and to be happy. It’s hard to keep this tradition knowing that there are still 59 hostages held in G**a. Approximately 23 are believed to be alive. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME NOW ??
There’s been some massive funding announcements this week in Israeli tech and venture, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that $1.1 trillion was erased from the public market this week in what seems to be a ‘correction’ that is at risk of putting the US in a recession. That can certainly trickle down to the private markets and might keep the IPO window closed, for now.
In the wider tech world, Google released Gemma 3, a collection of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models that can run on a single GPU/TPU. Google also unveiled Gemini Robotics, bringing its advanced reasoning and vision model to the physical world – a new ‘Android’ moment for Google. The search giant also released a free new AI coding assistant with high usage caps. OpenAI unveiled Responses API, a new framework for building custom AI agents. It allows developers to create task-specific agents with real-time web search and app integration. The company is pushing to ban Chinese LLMs in the US. Meta started testing an in-house AI training chip. Luma AI has introduced Ray2 Flash, an upgraded text-to-video model for fast generation. Reka AI launched Flash 3 Reasoning, an open-source 21B model. Tencent released Hunyuan-TurboS – the first ultra-large Hybrid-Transformer-Mamba MoE model and also launched a free image to video model. Alibaba Group also open-sourced its AI video generation model and made them freely available. Also in Chinese AI, Manus AI, the operator AI assistant is generated a lot of buzz and was dubbed the second Deepseek moment. Hedra has launched Character 3, an omnimodal model for generating animated talking characters from text or audio. Captions dropped their Mirage model. The world’s first AI audio-to-video foundation model designed to generate UGC content. Freepik partnered with Google to integrate Veo 2, and now it supports image-to-video. Anthropic‘s Claude can now control and talk directly to Blender, create 3D scenes at lightning speeds. Cohere debuted Command-A, a generative AI model aimed at complex enterprise tasks that can run on minimal compute. Interesting news in gaming: Niantic, Inc. sold its gaming unit which includes Pokemon Go! to Saudi owned Scopely for $3.5 billion and Sony is experimenting with AI-powered characters on Playstation.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Arik Shtilman and team Rapyd on securing $500M series F at $4.5M valuation to complete the acquisition of PayU!
- Good luck Manish Narula and team Cybereason on your $120M in new funding to stabilise the company for its next phase!
- Big Congrats Amitai Ratzon and team Pentera on securing $60M series D and unicorn status to boost security penetration testing for organisation! ?
- Way to go Yair Adato and team BRIA AI on raising your $40M series B to scale your gen AI visual models trained on licensed data!
- Well done Guy Flechter and team Sola Security on coming out of stealth with $30M in seed funding to offer cybersecurity protection to small and medium businesses!
- Kudos Alon Cohen and team QuamCore on coming out of stealth with a $9 million seed round to enable the implementation of a million-qubit computer in a 50 cm cube!
- Mazel tov Omer Agiv and team Faireez inc. on your $7.5M seed round to provide 5 star hotel style cleaning as a service!
- Great stuff Noam Maital and team Darwin AI on your $5M seed round to build the secure AI hub for governments!
EXITS
Not exactly a startup merger but kudos Moti Gutman and team Matrix on the $2.1 billion merger with Magic Software Enterprises to create the leading IT services company in Israel.
NEW FUNDS
- Kudos Dorit Dor, Maya Racine Netser and team Qbeat Ventures, on launching a new fund targeting $100M to fuel Israel’s quantum computing ecosystem!
APPOINTMENTS
- Congrats Alon Cinamon on joining Viola Ventures as director of investments!
- Kudos Jonathan Schwartz on joining Norwest to invest in early-growth Israeli investments!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- State of Israel’s pre-seed in 2025 – highlights of report by Fusion VC by me on VC Cafe, including comparisons to Europe and US latest data
- Israel in the new middle East – report by Jefferies
- How to build GenAI agents that actually work by Amit Mandelbaum , Tech Lead at AI21 Labs
GLOBAL
- Current market overview – some interesting data points by Redpoint: for example, 60% of unicorns haven’t raised additional funding since 2021 and are becoming Zombie companies…
- AI frenzy fuels the biggest US VC investment surge since 2021 – AI companies are attracting billions in funding, including 50% of ALL VC money invested in Q4 2024
- Project Europe wants to become the Thiel Fellowship for Europe – 20VC, Adjacent and Point Nine teamed up with a bunch of European founders to back promising 18-25 years old
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
What does a typical pre-seed round look like in Israel? based on recent report by Fusion VC (source)
In the years 2015-2024 Israeli startups in stealth raised over $125M. More and more startups are choosing to stay in stealth until after their seed rounds.
AI startup funding reached $103 billion in 2024, according to report by HumanX and Crunchbase
$1.1. trillion erased from the market this week. Who were the winners and losers? Bloomberg chart shows the one year change in various categories.
AI is creating a shift from manual, search-based transactions to more autonomous, intent-driven and personalized transaction experiences – by Acrew Capital (source)
Long NVIDIA? AI inference spending expected to grow 70% YoY to $208.2B in 2026
The European Generative AI landscape by Dawn Capital (source)
Customer service leads in generative AI deployments – chart by CB Insights
Revenue multiples remain sky-high for the most hyped late stage AI startups (source)
Consumer habits are changing. From Search to LLMs trend has grown 6x since June 2024 … by Okta
The future is bright.
That’s all for this week. Thank you for tuning in. 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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