Weekly #FIRGUN Newsletter

"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.

Greetings from Huntsville, Alabama! July was a weak moth in Israeli startup fundraising, with only $230M raised . So far in the first half of 2023, Israeli privately-held tech companies raised just $3.5 billion, a 65% decline compared to the same period in 2022.

My quote of the week is:

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." - Ellen Ochoa, former astronaut and the first Hispanic woman in space.

NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS

- Congratulations? Yoav Nathaniel ?and team? Silk Security, now part of Armis on your $12.5M seed round to enable security and operations stakeholders to collaboratively align finding risk with fixing risk!

- Mazal tov Yuval Weisglass and team ansā on your $9M series B for an autonomous counter-top coffee roasting for the point of consumption.

- Mabruk Eyal Moldovan ?and team? 40Seas ?on your $6M seed extension for your digital trade financing solution built for the global supply chain!

- Well done? Liat Primor ?and team? FeelBetter ?on your $5.9M series A for your AI powered medication management solution!

- Kol hakavod Avner Braverman ?and team? Voia ?on your $3M seed round for your mobile-based AI video editing solution!

- Nice job? Gil Mildworth and team? xFind (Acquired) ?on coming out of the garage with $3M raised to date for a chatbot to help customer support create articulate answers to free text questions.

- Congrats? Noam Hachmon ?and team? Skillset ?on coming out of the garage with $1.65M raised to date for your e-learning platform to help young people improve their physical fitness!

EXITS

- Congratulations? Shahar Fogel and team? Rookout (Acquired by Dynatrace) ?on the $50M acquisition by? Dynatrace !

- Well done? Ruth Ben Yakar, PhD ?and team? Biosight Ltd. ?on the acquisition by? Ayala Pharmaceuticals ?for an undisclosed sum.

- Kudos? Boaz Weizer ?and team? ZOOZ Power ?on the SPAC acquisition and dual listing by Keyarch Acquisition Corp.

NEW FUNDS

- Congrats? Fiona Darmon ??? ?and? Merav Weinryb ?on the announcement of your new fund, Sunvest Capital Partners , targeting $100M for secondary liquidity opportunities

APPOINTMENTS

- Huge congrats Etan Ilfeld ?on joining the Remagine Ventures team as Venture Partner! Excited to work closely together to invest in the best gaming, AI, and entertainment tech founders in Israel and the UK!

- Kudos Lisa Cohen on joining Intel Capital as a new Partner in the Israel office!

- Exciting news Hemdat Sagi on starting a new position as Managing Director at Konnect - Volkswagen Group Innovation Hub TLV !

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER:

1) The state of consumer tech in Israel in 2023 - my latest blog post on B2C funding, B2C champions, including 10 up and coming B2C startups to watch

2) ? The State of U.S. Early-Stage Venture & Startups: Q2 2023 by AngelList - 2Q23 saw the lowest rate of startup dealmaking in the history of their dataset (dating back to 2013).?

The State of Private Markets: Q2 2023 by Carta was more optimistic - Venture funding on Carta inched upward in Q2. Startups combined to raise more than $15.4 billion in funding during the second quarter of 2023, up 26% from Q1.

3)?This was another big week of generative AI progress

• Meta released AudioCraft , a new family of generative AI models built for generating high-quality, realistic audio & music from text. AudioCraft is a single code base that works for music, sound, compression & generation — all in the same place.
• Instagram is developing labels to identify AI-generated content, as revealed by app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi. A screenshot shows a notice stating that an image was "generated by Meta AI."
• LinkedIn LinkedIn is working on an AI assistant, according to app researcher Nima Owji . The app will reportedly help users: Apply for jobs, Learn new skills, Connect with their network and ask questions about prospective employers
• OpenAI trademarked GPT-5 with the USPTO . Back in March, Siqi Chen, founder of Runway said: "GPT-5?is scheduled to complete training this December and that OpenAI expects it to achieve AGI."
• 谷歌 DeepMind is bringing us a step closer to a robot-filled future with their newly launched vision-language-action model , RT-2, that uses internet data for better robotic control.? Google also announced big generative AI changes in search .
• Interesting from 英伟达 Israel - Perfusion, a new text-to-image personalization method . Interesting writeup on the Nvidia GPU shortage and who's getting access

Interesting reads:

• 高盛 :?AI investment forecast to approach $200 billion globally by 2025
• 摩根士丹利 recently released its 2Q23 CIO Survey , providing valuable insights into how enterprises are approaching data, AI, generative AI, and spending on related projects in 2023.
• Sequoia Capital - archive of AI posts
• Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models - an automatic way to jailbreak all of the commercial and open source models to do whatever they want
• A new generation of startup founders? or how to hustle as a young founder to get $$$

The list goes on, but check the 'housekeeping' section if you want to stat more frequently informed.

HOUSEKEEPING

?? I got very positive feedback on my?#GENAI ?Whatsapp group but I'm considering where to take it next. Rather than 'come as you are' I'm going to make a new group that's invite-only and more curated.?Fill this short form ?to express interest.

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

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

How to create AI powered videos with Hour One (first one is free!)

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

Do we have a reason to be optimistic? While the amount of venture dollars raised on Carta increased by 26% in Q2, the total number of deals stayed relatively flat. This means that the average investment size also increased, growing from about $10.4 million in Q1 to $13.1 million in Q2

How venture funding rounds differ, according to Crunchbase

Goldman Sachs:?AI investment forecast to approach $200 billion globally by 2025

New survey by 麦肯锡 on the state of AI in 2023: generative AI's breakthrough year . According to the survey, few companies seem fully prepared for the widespread use of gen AI—or the business risks these tools may bring. Just 21 percent of respondents reporting AI adoption say their organizations have established policies governing employees’ use of gen AI technologies in their work.

AI coding will unlock the next wave of developer productivity and reshape the software supply chain - several Israeli startups operate in this space (source )

Enterprise adoption of generative AI is growing, but slowly. CIOs expect AI/ML spending to accelerate +3.0% this year, while analytics spending growth is expected to remain stable.

The fancy data stack (source )

Interesting roundup of Venture capital funds tech stacks

That's all for this week. There's so much to celebrate in our "small" community! Keep on creating!

Eze Vidra

#tech #startups #israel #venturecapital #generativeAI