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It’s #Firgun time!
In case 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 the concept of Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p. In November #FIRGUN officially celebrated 5 years. See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can find previous editions on my blog, VC Cafe.
Necessity is the mother of invention. While there’s nothing fun about being attacked with hypersonic rockets, cluster bombs and UAVs, Israeli developers launched a wave of wartime mini-sites and hyper-local dashboards to manage the tension of the current escalation. Beyond the serious tools like the Home Front Command app and RocketAlert.live, we’ve seen the rise of Shelter Tech: from Who’s Single in the Shelter icebreakers via the The Hooked App (which uses QR codes at bunker entrances) to Am I Safe to Shower? risk-calculators that cross-reference real-time interception data with your average scrub time. Whether it’s funny dashboards tracking how long did you spend in the safe room or volunteer platforms like Purple Vest helping the elderly reach safety, or the “Iron Hedgehog” game simulating intercepting Iranian rockets with Iron Dome, this week proved that even under fire, the ecosystem’s first instinct is to build, iterate, and find a reason to smile (powered by vibe coding).
In the wider tech world, it was a week of dramatic plot twists and headline-grabbing moves across the AI landscape. OpenAI shut down its Sora video generation app just six months after launch, losing a $1 billion The Walt Disney Company licensing deal in the process, while simultaneously raising an additional $10B (bringing its latest round to ~$120B) and revealing early development of its next model, codenamed “Spud“. Since the start of 2026, OpenAI has already made six acquisitions nearly matching all of last year adding Astral (Python tooling) and Promptfoo (AI testing) among the recent additions. Google DeepMind launched TurboQuant, a quantization algorithm to enable massive compression of LLMs and vector search engines without sacrificing accuracy. Google also launched Lyria 3, an advanced AI music generation tool. Arm unveiled the AGI CPU, its first-ever in-house chip after 35 years of only licensing designs. It’s a 136-core, 3nm data center processor built for AI inference, with Meta as launch customer and OpenAI, Cerebras, Cloudflare, and SAP also signed on. Anthropic launched computer use in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, letting Claude control your Mac remotely to complete tasks while you’re away. Anthropic also announced Claude Code “auto mode” that enables Claude Code to make permission-level decisions while preventing destructive actions like mass file deletion/ Defense AI startup Shield AI raised $2B at a $12.7B valuation, more than doubling its value from a year ago. Mistral AI launched Voxtral TTS, its first text-to-speech model, as it expands from text generation into voice infrastructure for AI agents. AI unicorn Sierra launched ‘agents as a service‘ for customer support. Epic Games cut 1,000+ jobs, saying it is “spending significantly more” than it is making. AI from China continues to make progress: lower-cost Chinese AI models made by companies such as DeepSeek AI and MiniMax have overtaken their US rivals in token consumption since February, according to OpenRouter. ByteDance launched its Dreamina AI Seedance 2.0 audio and video model in its CapCut editing platform.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The strength of a nation is the strength of its people.” — Golda Meir
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Tal Kreisler and team NoTraffic on your $90M series C to transform urban mobility by leveraging AI to optimize traffic management systems!
- Well done Aviv Nahum and team Above Security on your $43M series A (and previously undisclosed $7M seed funding) on coming out of stealth for your insider risk management platform built around narrative intelligence!
- Way to go Rafael Broshi and team Notch on your $30M series A to manage real-life support, regulated workflows, sensitive data, and enterprise compliance at scale for regulated industries like insurance!
- Kudos Elad Ben Meir and team Onit Security on your $11M seed round to tackle vulnerability management!
- Mabruk Matan Goldner and team Conntour on your $7M seed round for real-time video intelligence analysis, allowing natural language search on CCTV footage.
- Good stuff Amiram Shachar and team Upwind Security on the rumours you’ve raised “tens of millions” in new strategic funding to create an independent alternative to Wiz…
EXITS
- No exits recorded this week
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
ISRAEL
GLOBAL
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
Benchmarks on size and valuation of Israeli pre seed in 2025 (see source in links section)
AI-Native Services market map by Emergence Capital
Wealth management is at an inflection point: $83T in generational wealth is changing hands, clients are expecting more from their advisors, and the opportunity for technology to step in has never been bigger. Landscape by Insight Partners (source)
Robotics data infrastructure map by Boost VC
The AI-first GTM Tech Stack by Battery Ventures
A new CAMERA analysis found BBC , CNN , NBC News and The New York Times used the phrase “war crime” 32 times in the first three weeks of the U.S./Israel-Iran war. 88% of those applications were directed solely toward the actions of the United States and/or Israel.
Zero were directed solely toward the actions of the Islamic Republic of Iran. (source)
spot on.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. Stay safe out there. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!
Eze Vidra
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.