The unique model of #FIRGUN was revealed on Linkedin.
Should you’re new right here, the phrase “Firgun” (pronounced ‘feer-goon’) is a casual fashionable Hebrew time period and idea in Israeli tradition (initially Yiddish), which describes real, unselfish delight or satisfaction within the accomplishment of the opposite particular person. It’s the other of “schadenfreude” (which stands for being pleased for another person’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, satisfaction, or admiration for members of our group’s accomplishments, luck and wins. Extra about Firgun and why it issues on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p
“Let my individuals go” is the message of Passover. For the 59 Israeli hostages (roughly 21 of them with proofs of life) held in G**a and their households, it’s been a dwelling nightmare for the previous 559 days. It’s time to #BRINGTHEMHOME ??
It’s a privilege to have a good time the ‘wins’ within the Israeli startup ecosystem week after week, nevertheless it’s value mentioning that these usually are not ‘regular’ instances and actually, it’s an extremely difficult interval. For sure, there’s nonetheless a warfare occurring, it’s harder for startups to elevating funding (globally and extra so in Israel, the place Worldwide buyers are much less often on the bottom lately), Trump’s Tariffs uncertainty, reservists, rocket alarms (simply this morning following a Huti missile launch, and many others). So after all there’s typically unhealthy information too: corporations shutting down, Worldwide funds closing their native workplaces, and many others. I’ve determined that there are sufficient newspapers telling these tales. #FIRGUN is right here to concentrate on the excellent news in Israeli tech and enterprise.
Within the wider tech world, Trump’s suspending the brand new world tariffs for 90 days assist the market get better (maybe quickly) and despatched Gold to hit document excessive after Powell warns commerce warfare may rattle markets. Gold is up 28% this yr. OpenAI launched 4.1 a brand new model of its flagship mannequin which helps as much as 1M tokens of context and will exchange GPT 4.5. It additionally launched new o3 and o4-mini reasoning fashions, related high quality to Deep Analysis however sooner. OpenAI is alleged to purchase AI coding device Windsurf for roughly $3B. OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever raised $2 billion at $32 billion valuation for Protected Superintelligence Inc. and Mira Murati reportedly raised a $2 billion “seed” spherical valuing her new firm Considering Machines Lab at $10 billion (pre-product). Anthropic has launched a new analysis device for Claude with Google Workspace integration. Google was discovered responsible in one other antitrust case, rising the possibilities it could be damaged up by the regulator. Google’s Gemma helps researchers decode dolphin communication and YouTube launched free AI music device for creators. NVIDIA inventory went down after the corporate was slapped with a $5.5 billion cost for promoting Chips to China. The corporate will start Blackwell chip manufacturing at TSMC Arizona and is planning to spend as much as $500bn constructing AI supercomputers fully within the US for the primary time. Talking of China, the tariff wars escalated to the Chinese language threatening to cease the sale of uncommon earths (which is able to influence world provide chain of chips). Netflix is testing AI search engine for present suggestions (to transcend titles). Apple is supposedly decided to launch AR glasses earlier than Meta and Hugging Face acquired Pollen Robotics and plans to promote robots…
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Should you assume you’re too small to make a distinction, attempt sleeping with a mosquito.” — Dalai Lama
NEW FUNDING ROUNDS
- Congratulations Ron Gaver and workforce Tapcheck in your $25M collection A to increase in your actual time cost options!
- Kudos Dor Sarig and workforce Pillar Safety on elevating $9M in Seed funding to deal with AI-specific cyber threats!
- Technique to go Imri Marcus and workforce Brandlight on popping out of stealth with $5.75M in seed funding to assist corporations affect how ChatGPT and different AI techniques symbolize their manufacturers!
EXITS
LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER
ISRAEL & GLOBAL
- The AI 50 record by Sequoia and Forbes – the AI 50 record reveals how corporations are utilizing brokers and reasoning fashions to tackle actual enterprise workflows
- We’re not alone – scientists discover the strongest proof to this point on life past our photo voltaic system with pictures from Hubble
- The primary all feminine house flight occurred final week with Katy Perry and Gayle King on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. However the Web was stuffed with memes and conspiracy theories.
MEDIA OF THE WEEK
The newest digital well being Israeli panorama was revealed by Team8 that includes 90 startups. It was added to my panorama assortment on VC Cafe. (supply)
The AI50 by Sequoia and Forbes
The AI Agent Autonomy Scale by Bessemer Enterprise Companions (supply)
The ecosystem for stablecoins by Daybreak Capital
Customers are flocking to LLMs. Right here’s the newest app downloads stats by CB Insights. Sam Altman stated that ChatGPT customers hit 500 million after which doubled ‘in weeks’.
That’s all for this week. There’s rather a lot to have a good time in our “small” group. Carry on creating!
I am a former common associate 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 growing world.
