Weekly #FIRGUN Newsletter

As every Friday, it's my pleasure to share a weekly summary of the movers and shakers in Israeli tech and venture. If you're not yet subscribed, click the button get the next edition straight into your inbox.

"Firgun" (Hebrew: ??????/ 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. More about Firgun and why it matters on?VC Cafe:?https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p

Naturally, I had to ask ChatGPT to help me with the definition of "Firgun" and how it's used in practice. Here's the answer:

"Firgun" is a Hebrew term that is often translated as "altruistic pleasure" or "kindness" or "generosity." It refers to the act of feeling happy or satisfied when others succeed or are fortunate, and is often used to describe a person who takes pleasure in the success or happiness of others. In practice, Firgun can be expressed in many ways, such as by offering congratulations, expressing appreciation, or by taking actions that help others achieve their goals. It is an important value in many cultures, and is particularly prevalent in Israeli culture.

The Q1 2023 numbers are out: Q1/2023 was the weakest quarter in Israeli startups capital raising since 2018, with just 105 deals made. This was 70% and 20% down from Q1/2022 and Q4/2022, respectively.?Three Mega Deals “saved” this quarter (investments in Wiz , eToro and Via ) and accounted for 38% of total capital raised in Q1/2023.

My quote of the week is:

"In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn." - The 50th law, Robert Greene

NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS

- Congratulations? Tomer Greenwald ?and team? Otterize ?on coming out of stealth with a $11.5M seed round to enable developers to focus on writing code rather than on configuring permissions and managing policies!

- Kudos? Ziv Wangenheim ?and team? Rupert ?on your $8M seed round to offer hyper-personalised insight alerts to business stakeholders with your offer hyper-personalized insight alerts to business stakeholders!

- Mabruk? Uri Meirovich ?and team? Skarper ?on your $5M series A for your click-on engine to transform any regular bike into an electric bike!

EXITS

- No exits reported this week

APPOINTMENTS

- Congratulations? Moran Zilbershtein on joining Glilot Capital Partners as VP value creation and kudos Sian Goldofsky, MSc MBA on being promoted to principal

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER:

1)?Media and entertainment are the industries most susceptible to tech disruption and generative AI is changing the ball game. My partner Kevin Baxpehler published a post on VC Cafe titled: Why generative AI's impact on entertainment will come fast and hard

2)?The Q1 2023 quarterly review of the Israeli startup ecosystem by IVC Data and Insights .

3)?Generative AI continued to advance this week. A few interesting nuggets

• Have you heard of AutoGPT? AutoGPTs, which appeared just last week, are designed to automate GPT-4 tasks, enabling the creation of agents that complete tasks for you without any intervention.
• Israel's AI21 Labs partnered with 亚马逊 to use its LLM
• Databricks releases Dolly 2.0, the next version of its LLM released two weeks ago, and a dataset trained on 15K records generated by its employees
• Elon Musk and Twitter are experimenting with GenerativeAI
• OpenAI and Figure join the race to humanoid robot workersInteresting research: Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior
• A team of researchers presented a new AI-powered algorithm that is capable of creating digital copies of real-world objects.

HOUSEKEEPING

?? For those of you who are interested in generative AI, I created?a new Whatsapp Community?for more frequent updates

?? Please subscribe to my new?Youtube Channel?and?TikTok channel?- I post videos daily on Generative AI, startups and venture capital

CHART(s) OF THE WEEK

The race to AGI needs to slow down, says Ian Hogarth in a recent Financial Times piece

Venture capital is feeling the pinch everywhere, new charts by CB Insights show

The AI50 2023 list by Meritech Capital , Sequoia Capital and Forbes

710 pre-seed companies raised money on SAFEs on Carta in Q1 2023. Here's what we know:????????????????????? ???????? ?????????????? ?????????????????? ???????? 1. Renewable energy 2. Biotech 3. Video games?

That's all for this week. Thank you for reading. Please comment, like and share so others can discover the newsletter.

There's so much to celebrate in our "small" community! keep on creating!

Eze Vidra