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For those who’re new right here, the phrase “Firgun” (pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is a casual trendy Hebrew time period and idea in Israeli tradition (initially Yiddish), which describes real, unselfish delight or pleasure within the accomplishment of the opposite particular person. It’s the alternative of “schadenfreude” (which stands for being glad for another person’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pleasure, or admiration for members of our group’s accomplishments, success and wins. Extra about Firgun and why it issues on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
With section 1 of the ceasefire now full, the destiny of the remaining h**tages in G**a stays unsure. We all know of roughly 22 dwelling Israelis, held by Ha**s towards their will (out of a complete of 59 host**es remaining there. We should #BRINGTHEMHOME NOW.
Within the wider tech world, Anthropic has launched the market’s first hybrid reasoning mannequin Claude 3.7 which reportedly price “just a few tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}” to coach, just like Claude 3.5 and cheaper than GPT-4, which price over $100M. Anthropic additionally launched Claude Code, their first agentic coding software and is wrapping up a $3.5 billion spherical at a $61 billion valuation. Calude 3.7 OpenAI launches GPT-4.5, its “most educated mannequin but” in analysis preview (aimed toward enhancing writing)- the corporate has projected its money burn to hit ~$20B in 2027. Amazon Net Companies (AWS) unveiled Ocelot, its new quantum chip in-built partnership with Caltech, that includes 5 qubits that retailer knowledge and 4 extra qubits to detect errors. Microsoft unveiled the three.8B-parameter text-only Phi-4-mini and 5.6B-parameter Phi-4-multimodal, claiming each outperform similar-sized fashions in sure duties. DeepSeek AI sparked a nationwide push in China to deploy its LLMs in all places from hospitals to native governments. Mira Murati’s Pondering Machine Labs stated to lift $1B at $9B valuation. Perplexity is launching its personal $50m VC fund. A brand new basis mannequin referred to as Magma, claims to be the primary for multimodal AI brokers. Additionally, NVIDIA launched a basis mannequin for molecular biology. ElevenLabs launched its personal speech to textual content mannequin. Amazon launched Alexa+, an AI makeover of its house assistant. Alibaba Group has simply launched Wan2.1, a household of open-source AI video fashions designed to generate high-quality pictures and movies from textual content and picture inputs. In the meantime, Veo 2, Google‘s textual content to video mannequin will price 50 cents per second. Greater than 1 billion folks each month take a look at podcasts on YouTube. A second within the Creator Financial system: MrBeast is in talks to lift funding at a $5 billion valuation.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Hardships typically put together atypical folks for a unprecedented future.”
— C.S. Lewis
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
EXITS
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- An fascinating report and survey of 25 early stage enterprise funds in Israel (together with us at Remagine Ventures) exhibits the key developments in pre-seed and seed. I wrote in regards to the main takeaways on VC Cafe and you’ll entry the report by F2 Enterprise Capital right here.
- Ori Goshen of AI21 Labs reveals what’s damaged in Enterprise AI and what’s wanted for the subsequent section.
- Gigi Levy-Weiss predicts that the subsequent 10 years can be all in regards to the AI Agent Financial system
GLOBAL
- Accelerating Europe report (half 1 of three) by Dealroom.co places the highlight on the explanations to be optimistic in regards to the continent’s future tech potential. A number of knowledge right here.
- The state of cellular in This autumn 2024 report by Sensor Tower reveals that TikTok is the primary cellular app to hit $6B in annual shopper spending.
- Ten ideas for constructing sturdy vertical AI companies, by Bessemer Enterprise Companions
Cybersecurity and vertical AI deemed highest potential areas of funding by 25 early stage Israeli VCs in newest report (supply)
One of many huge issues of enterprise capital as of late is the shortage of liquidity. A part of the reason being that huge tech will not be buying as many startups as earlier than.
Superagency within the office – how gen AI capabilities have developed prior to now two years by McKinsey & Firm (supply)
We’re getting nearer to the 1 worker unicorn? listed below are the Unicorns with the fewest staff
Funding framework for AI startups in accordance with Bessemer Enterprise Companions
The product technique dash for startups by Lenny Rachitsky (supply)
The highest 50 generative AI use circumstances in advertising and marketing (supply)
The Music AI startup panorama by Cherie Hu (supply)
That’s all for this week. There’s loads to rejoice in our “small’ group! Carry on creating.
I am a former normal accomplice at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google’s first bodily hub for startups.
I am additionally the founding father of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing collectively the startup ecosystem on biking challenges in assist of Room to Learn. Since inception in 2012 we have constructed 11 faculties and 50 libraries within the creating world.
