The original version of #Firgun was pubslished to 7,800+ subscribers on Linkedin.
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.
In Israel, the week was marked by Passover under fire. As Operation Roaring Lion entered its second month, Israelis sat down for their Seder on Wednesday night only to be sent running to shelters as Iran launched its largest ballistic missile barrage in weeks, with at least 10 missiles targeting central Israel across multiple salvos throughout the evening. Hezbollah joined with some 100 rockets toward the Galilee. Families paused Passover cooking and cleaning to rush to safe rooms multiple times throughout the day; in Tel Aviv, a parking garage under a mall was transformed into a makeshift Seder hall with folding tables, string lights, and matzoh. Despite it all, Israelis marked the festival of freedom this year, with a deeper resonance than most. Chag sameach!
In the wider tech world, OpenAI closed a record $122B round at an $852B valuation, with Amazon ($50B), NVIDIA ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B) anchoring, and revealed it now generates $2B/month in revenue with 900M weekly ChatGPT users. SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO targeting a $1.75T valuation and a June listing, which would be the largest public offering in history. NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration‘s Artemis II lifted off on April 1, sending four astronauts on a 10-day flyby of the Moon, humanity’s first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years. Google released Gemma 4, its most capable open-source models yet, with multimodal support, 256K context windows, and Apache 2.0 licensing. Mistral AI secured $830M in debt financing to buy 13,800 Nvidia GPUs for a Paris data center, with ARR now past $400M and targeting $1B by year-end. Oracle cut around 30,000 jobs to redirect spending toward AI data center infrastructure. Cisco unveiled a Zero Trust framework for securing autonomous AI agents at RSA 2026. Crunchbase reported Q1 2026 shattered all records with $297B invested globally, 80% of it in AI, and foundational AI funding alone doubled all of 2025 in a single quarter.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
The message of Passover remains as urgent as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.”
— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Yodar Shafrir and team ScaleOps on securing $130M series C to advance autonomous AI infrastructure management!
- Kudos Itamar Friedman and team Qodo on raising a $70 series B to fight against AI slope in the coding world!
- Well done Daphna Langer and team Voltify on securing a $30M seed round to electrify freight rail!
- Way to go Itai Gafni and team Huskeys for coming out of stealth with an $8M seed round for your modern edge security management (ESM) platform!
- Mazel tov Tal Hoffman and team Enclave on coming out stealth with a $6M seed round to help developers ship code with confidence by eliminating security bottlenecks!
- Kol hakavod Uri Oron and team NovaLink Space on securing an undisclosed seed round to provide optical satellite communication systems intended for space-based data relay purposes!
EXITS
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE
ISRAEL
GLOBAL
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The Tel Aviv tech ecosystem 2025 snapshot. $14.1B raised in 2025 (+77% YoY) and $46B in exits in 2025 a record year.
For context: that’s more than the GDP of countries like Iceland, Luxembourg, or Paraguay – generated by a startup ecosystem in a metro area smaller than Atlanta.
And the ecosystem keeps expanding:
* 2,600+ active tech companies
* 190 multinational corporations (+12%)
* 23 new international R&D centers launched in 2025
* 422 venture capital investors active in the ecosystem
* Foreign investors accounted for 61% of total funding
Israeli data centre infrastructure map by Grove Ventures (source)
According to the report, Israeli tech companies raised $3.1 billion in 98 rounds, a 34% increase in capital raised, with no change in the number of deals compared to Q1/2025. (source)
The Bessemer Venture Partners AI Infrastructure Roadmap explores five tech frontiers identified in 2026: from continual learning systems that evolve in production to world models that simulate physical reality, and production-scale inference to reinforcement learning platforms that teach AI through experience. (source)
Should AI agents get a bank account? Or a credit card? Here’s the agentic AI payment ecosystem by Norwest (source)
Q1 2026 broke records in funding (source)
How much ARR do you need to raise? no one knows!
That’s all for this week, thank you for reading. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!
Chag Pesach Sameach, and Happy Easter!
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.
