The original version of #FIRGUN was published on Linkedin.
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
“Let my people go” is the message of Passover. For the 59 Israeli hostages (approximately 21 of them with proofs of life) held in G**a and their families, it’s been a living nightmare for the past 559 days. It’s time to #BRINGTHEMHOME ??
It’s a privilege to celebrate the ‘wins’ in the Israeli startup ecosystem week after week, but it’s worth mentioning that these are not ‘normal’ times and in fact, it’s an incredibly challenging period. Needless to say, there’s still a war going on, it’s more difficult for startups to raising funding (globally and more so in Israel, where International investors are less frequently on the ground these days), Trump’s Tariffs uncertainty, reservists, rocket alarms (just this morning following a Huti missile launch, etc). So of course there’s sometimes bad news too: companies shutting down, International funds closing their local offices, etc. I’ve decided that there are enough newspapers telling those stories. #FIRGUN is here to focus on the good news in Israeli tech and venture.
In the wider tech world, Trump’s postponing the new global tariffs for 90 days help the market recover (perhaps temporarily) and sent Gold to hit record high after Powell warns trade war could rattle markets. Gold is up 28% this year. OpenAI launched 4.1 a new version of its flagship model which supports up to 1M tokens of context and will replace GPT 4.5. It also released new o3 and o4-mini reasoning models, similar quality to Deep Research but faster. OpenAI is said to buy AI coding tool Windsurf for approximately $3B. OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever raised $2 billion at $32 billion valuation for Safe Superintelligence Inc. and Mira Murati reportedly raised a $2 billion “seed” round valuing her new company Thinking Machines Lab at $10 billion (pre-product). Anthropic has launched a new research tool for Claude with Google Workspace integration. Google was found guilty in another antitrust case, increasing the chances it might be broken up by the regulator. Google’s Gemma is helping researchers decode dolphin communication and YouTube launched free AI music tool for creators. NVIDIA stock went down after the company was slapped with a $5.5 billion charge for selling Chips to China. The company will begin Blackwell chip production at TSMC Arizona and is planning to spend up to $500bn building AI supercomputers entirely in the US for the first time. Speaking of China, the tariff wars escalated to the Chinese threatening to stop the sale of rare earths (which will impact global supply chain of chips). Netflix is testing AI search engine for show recommendations (to go beyond titles). Apple is supposedly determined to launch AR glasses before Meta and Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics and plans to sell robots…
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” — Dalai Lama
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Ron Gaver and team Tapcheck on your $25M series A to expand on your real time payment solutions!
- Kudos Dor Sarig and team Pillar Security on raising $9M in Seed funding to tackle AI-specific cyber threats!
- Way to go Imri Marcus and team Brandlight on coming out of stealth with $5.75M in seed funding to help companies influence how ChatGPT and other AI systems represent their brands!
EXITS
- Well done Zvi Guterman and team CloudShare on the acquisition by Bow River Capital in a deal estimated $60–80 million deal!
- Congrats Eliya Elon ? and team Revrod (acq. by Torq) on the acquisition by Torq for an estimated $20M to power multi-agent RAG security!
- Kudos Roei Schwartz and team Simtex on the acquisition by VOYE for an estimated $20M to power e-Sim expansion!
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL & GLOBAL
- The AI 50 list by Sequoia and Forbes – the AI 50 list shows how companies are using agents and reasoning models to take on real enterprise workflows
- We are not alone – scientists find the strongest evidence so far on life beyond our solar system with images from Hubble
- The first all female space flight took place last week with Katy Perry and Gayle King on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. But the Internet was full of memes and conspiracy theories.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The latest digital health Israeli landscape was published by Team8 featuring 90 startups. It was added to my landscape collection on VC Cafe. (source)
The AI50 by Sequoia and Forbes
The AI Agent Autonomy Scale by Bessemer Venture Partners (source)
The ecosystem for stablecoins by Dawn Capital
Users are flocking to LLMs. Here’s the latest app downloads stats by CB Insights. Sam Altman said that ChatGPT users hit 500 million and then doubled ‘in weeks’.
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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