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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
It’s been 538 days since October 7th. It’s hard to compute that there are still 59 host***es held in G**a. Their families have been in a living nightmare. I got a chance to shake the hand of Ruby Chen, a fellow VC and his wife this week. Their son is one of them. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME ??
This week Calcalist ??????? brought the Israeli ecosystem together in the Big Apple for a packed week of events celebrating Israeli tech. Despite the challenges the country is facing (there were sirens daily this week following missile launches from the Hutis in Yemen) , there was a positive atmosphere and outlook in every conversation. Shaun Maguire said on stage that he believes that Wiz is just the beginning and Israel can create a trillion dollar company.
In the wider tech world, OpenAI broke the Internet this week with their new GPT 4o image generator. Bloomberg reported that the company is close to finalising a $40bn funding round led by SoftBank. Downloads of encrypted messaging app Signal Messenger soared after top leaders in the US administration included a reporter from The Atlantic on a chat discussing war plans. The deadline for TikTok in the US is coming up, and a new bidder seems to be Perplexity who is bidding to buy the company and wants to open-source the recommendation algorithm. Zoom started adding agentic AI features to its video calls. Google has released Gemini 2.5 Pro. This is their most advanced model yet, and already #1 on the LMArena leaderboard. DeepSeek has upgraded its model DeepSeek V3. This model provides an increase in reasoning capabilities-compared to its previous version. Microsoft has launched Researcher, which tackles complex, multi-step research by combining OpenAI’s deep research model with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s advanced orchestration and deep search capabilities. Alibaba Group has released LHM, their Large Animatable Human Reconstruction model. Can take a single image and make a human dance… it also launched TaoAvatar. This AI can create lifelike 3D humans you can talk to in real time AR. Chinese companies continue to release open source AI models. Qwen has dropped three new models this week. A new AI model, ECgMLP, detects endometrial cancer with 99.26% accuracy.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
Winston Churchill
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Dan Amiga, Michael Fey and team Island on securing a $250M series E round (at a $4.8 billion valuation) for your secure enterprise browser!
- Kudos Ronen Lavi and team Navina on securing a $55M series C for your AI co-pilot for clinician diagnostics!
- Is it too early to congratulate Roi Tiger and his stealth team on securing $55M in funding for a new cybersecurity startup in stealth? watch this space!
- Kol hakavod Didier Toubia and team Aleph Farms on raising $29M series C to scale production of cultivated meat in your pilot facility!
- Awesome news David Sosna and team Sympera AI on raising a $10M seed round to scale relationship banking with AI agents!
- Well done Roy Zur and team Charm Security on coming out of stealth with an $8M seed round to stop AI-powered scams before they happen!
- Mazal tov Yonatan Golan and team Brevel on the additional $5M in funding, expanding your seed round to $25M to advance microalgae protein production!
EXITS
There were no exits recorded this week (we’re still reeling from Wiz and Next Insurance anyway!)
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- Gili Raanan on the Invest like the best podcast – on taking Cyberstarts from $50M to $2 billion investing in Israeli tech
- The most promising Israeli growth startups in 2025 by Qumra Capital
- “Right now the smartest thing to do is to invest in Israel” – said Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital.
GLOBAL
- The fourth edition of the Europe and Israel’s Founder Factories, exploring the startups founded by staff alumni of European and Israeli unicorns – created by Dealroom.co with Accel
- The 2025 consumer trends research report by The New Consumer
- NVIDIA‘s Jensen Huang breaks down why AI is the most consequential technology of all time – by Andreessen Horowitz
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Top countries (Israel + Europe) by venture backed unicorns
Spotlight on Israel: 65 unicorns founded in Israel have fuelled 380 startups across Europe and Israel. (source)
Q1’25 has already tied the all-time high for $1B+ startup acquisitions by count (11), matching the dot-com peak (Q1 2000) and the ZIRP boom (Q4 2020). But in deal value, it’s not even close. Thanks to Google’s $33B acquisition of Wiz, the quarter’s total has hit $54.5B — a 44% jump over the previous record. By CB Insights
It’s been a couple of days since OpenAI released its new image creation engine in ChatGPT, and the main use case that spread like wildfires is creating images in the style of Japanese animation Studio Ghibli (the company behind “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro”) (source)
US Seed stage landscape in 2024 – how did the various sectors fare? by Carta
YouTube captured 11.6% of all U.S. TV time in Feb (source)
Requests for startups in the Edtech space (by Emerge VC)
DeepSeek V3 update emerges as highest-scoring non-reasoning model
Gen Z stopped drinking alcohol…
Meet Blue – Nvidia and Disney Research new cute (but smart) robot
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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