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If you happen to’re new right here, the phrase “Firgun” (pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is an off-the-cuff 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 completely satisfied for another person’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pleasure, or admiration for members of our neighborhood’s accomplishments, luck and wins. Extra about Firgun and why it issues on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
At this time we rejoice “Purim”, one other Jewish vacation celebrating one other foiled try to kill our individuals (joking, sort of). In Purim the customized is to placed on fancy gown and to be completely satisfied. It’s arduous to maintain this custom figuring out that there are nonetheless 59 hostages held in G**a. Roughly 23 are believed to be alive. We should #BRINGTHEMHOME NOW ??
There’s been some large funding bulletins this week in Israeli tech and enterprise, nevertheless it’s arduous to disregard the truth that $1.1 trillion was erased from the general public market this week in what appears to be a ‘correction’ that’s liable to placing the US in a recession. That may definitely trickle right down to the personal markets and would possibly preserve the IPO window closed, for now.
Within the wider tech world, Google launched Gemma 3, a group of light-weight, state-of-the-art open fashions that may run on a single GPU/TPU. Google additionally unveiled Gemini Robotics, bringing its superior reasoning and imaginative and prescient mannequin to the bodily world – a brand new ‘Android’ second for Google. The search large additionally launched a free new AI coding assistant with excessive utilization caps. OpenAI unveiled Responses API, a brand new framework for constructing customized AI brokers. It permits builders to create task-specific brokers with real-time internet search and app integration. The corporate is pushing to ban Chinese language LLMs within the US. Meta began testing an in-house AI coaching chip. Luma AI has launched Ray2 Flash, an upgraded text-to-video mannequin for quick technology. Reka AI launched Flash 3 Reasoning, an open-source 21B mannequin. Tencent launched Hunyuan-TurboS – the primary ultra-large Hybrid-Transformer-Mamba MoE mannequin and likewise launched a free picture to video mannequin. Alibaba Group additionally open-sourced its AI video technology mannequin and made them freely obtainable. Additionally in Chinese language AI, Manus AI, the operator AI assistant is generated a whole lot of buzz and was dubbed the second Deepseek second. Hedra has launched Character 3, an omnimodal mannequin for producing animated speaking characters from textual content or audio. Captions dropped their Mirage mannequin. The world’s first AI audio-to-video basis mannequin designed to generate UGC content material. Freepik partnered with Google to combine Veo 2, and now it helps image-to-video. Anthropic‘s Claude can now management and speak on to Blender, create 3D scenes at lightning speeds. Cohere debuted Command-A, a generative AI mannequin aimed toward advanced enterprise duties that may run on minimal compute. Attention-grabbing information in gaming: Niantic, Inc. offered its gaming unit which incorporates Pokemon Go! to Saudi owned Scopely for $3.5 billion and Sony is experimenting with AI-powered characters on Ps.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Any sufficiently superior know-how is indistinguishable from magic.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Arik Shtilman and group Rapyd on securing $500M collection F at $4.5M valuation to finish the acquisition of PayU!
- Good luck Manish Narula and group Cybereason in your $120M in new funding to stabilise the corporate for its subsequent part!
- Huge Congrats Amitai Ratzon and group Pentera on securing $60M collection D and unicorn standing to spice up safety penetration testing for organisation! ?
- Option to go Yair Adato and group BRIA AI on elevating your $40M collection B to scale your gen AI visible fashions skilled on licensed knowledge!
- Nicely executed Man Flechter and group Sola Safety on popping out of stealth with $30M in seed funding to supply cybersecurity safety to small and medium companies!
- Kudos Alon Cohen and group QuamCore on popping out of stealth with a $9 million seed spherical to allow the implementation of a million-qubit laptop in a 50 cm dice!
- Mazel tov Omer Agiv and group Faireez inc. in your $7.5M seed spherical to supply 5 star resort fashion cleansing as a service!
- Nice stuff Noam Maital and group Darwin AI in your $5M seed spherical to construct the safe AI hub for governments!
EXITS
Not precisely a startup merger however kudos Moti Gutman and group Matrix on the $2.1 billion merger with Magic Software program Enterprises to create the main IT companies firm in Israel.
NEW FUNDS
APPOINTMENTS
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL
- State of Israel’s pre-seed in 2025 – highlights of report by Fusion VC by me on VC Cafe, together with comparisons to Europe and US newest knowledge
- Israel within the new center East – report by Jefferies
- construct GenAI brokers that truly work by Amit Mandelbaum , Tech Lead at AI21 Labs
GLOBAL
- Present market overview – some attention-grabbing knowledge factors by Redpoint: for instance, 60% of unicorns haven’t raised extra funding since 2021 and have gotten Zombie firms…
- AI frenzy fuels the most important US VC funding surge since 2021 – AI firms are attracting billions in funding, together with 50% of ALL VC cash invested in This autumn 2024
- Venture Europe desires to change into the Thiel Fellowship for Europe – 20VC, Adjoining and Level 9 teamed up with a bunch of European founders to again promising 18-25 years outdated
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
What does a typical pre-seed spherical appear to be in Israel? based mostly on current report by Fusion VC (supply)
Within the years 2015-2024 Israeli startups in stealth raised over $125M. An increasing number of startups are selecting to remain in stealth till after their seed rounds.
AI startup funding reached $103 billion in 2024, based on report by HumanX and Crunchbase
$1.1. trillion erased from the market this week. Who had been the winners and losers? Bloomberg chart exhibits the one 12 months change in numerous classes.
AI is making a shift from handbook, search-based transactions to extra autonomous, intent-driven and customized transaction experiences – by Acrew Capital (supply)
Lengthy NVIDIA? AI inference spending anticipated to develop 70% YoY to $208.2B in 2026
The European Generative AI panorama by Daybreak Capital (supply)
Customer support leads in generative AI deployments – chart by CB Insights
Income multiples stay sky-high for essentially the most hyped late stage AI startups (supply)
Shopper habits are altering. From Search to LLMs development has grown 6x since June 2024 … by Okta
The long run is vivid.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for tuning in. There’s so much to rejoice in our “small” neighborhood. Carry on creating!
I am a former common companion 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 help of Room to Learn. Since inception in 2012 we have constructed 11 colleges and 50 libraries within the creating world.
