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.

Hope this week's Firgun newsletter finds you well and enjoying the summer...? GenAI startups secured $14.1B in the first half of 2023 — more than 5x 2022’s year-end total. Even without OpenAI’s massive mega-round, H1’23 genAI funding still surpassed the previous annual funding record set in 2021.

My quote of the week is:

“Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We’re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on.” —Larry Page

NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS

- Congratulations? Dedi Gilad ?and team? TytoCare ?on your $49M series E to offer AI-powered virtual care for chronic conditions!

- Mabruk Alon Geva ??and team? WINT Water Intelligence ?on your $35M series C for your IOT water management and leak-prevention solutions!

- Kudos Matan Fattal ??and team? IVIX your $12.5M series A to help authorities detect large scale tax evasion with AI!

- Well done? Dror Kashti ?and team? Sweet Security ?on your $12M seed round for your real-time cloud-native security suite to stop attacks on cloud workloads!

- Kol hakavod? Ariel Chen ?and team? Chargeflow ?on your $11M series A round for your fintech platform to automate the process of credit card disputes for merchants!

- Big thumbs up Iftach Ian Amit ?and team? Gomboc AI ?on your $5.2M seed round for your deterministic AI-powered cloud infrastructure remediation platform!

- Nice job? Avi Messica ?and team? NeoLogic ?on your $5M seed extension to reduce the size of semiconductors by shrinking the transistors count of digital cores by up to 3x at any technology node!

- Mazel tov Itamar Roth ?and team? Colleen AI ?on your $3.5M seed round for AI powered multifamily building management solution!

- Congrats Michael Brown ?and team? Skyline Robotics ?on your $3.35M in new funding to clean skyscraper windows with robots!

- Way to go ★ Adir Oren ?? ?and team? gigaroo on your $2.6M seed funding for gig economy job marketplace to help Gen-z users find their first jobs!

- Good stuff Adam Bismut ?and team? SightBit on coming out of the garage with $2M raised to date for your computer vision drown prevention system!

EXITS

- Congratulations? Amit Bareket and team? Perimeter 81, a Check Point Company ?on the acquisition by Check Point Software for a reported $490M!

- Mazel tov? Noam Lando ?and team Webbing on the acquisition by? Wireless Logic Ltd ?for $225M!

- Well done? Amit Shaked ?and team Laminar (acquired by Rubrik) on the acquisition by? Rubrik ?for an estimated sum of $225M!

- Kudos Amit Batzir ?and team? Spott ?on the acquisition by Payoneer - deal terms were not disclosed.

NEW FUNDS

- Congrats? Yuval Ariav ?and?team Symbol ?on the announcement of your new $50M fund to invest in pre-consensus Israeli founded startups! Looks like you're already off to a good start and I look forward to collaborate with Remagine Ventures !

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER:

1)? Bessemer Venture Partners released their annual "Cloud 100" list of the world's top cloud companies, and it includes 17 Israeli startups.

2) ?President Biden signed an executive order restricting U.S. firms from investing in Chinese companies focused on areas like semiconductors, quantum computing, and AI technologies. The order, which goes into effect in 2024, targets U.S. venture capital and private equity investment.

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

• Stability AI launched StableCode, their very first generative AI tool for coding. It aims to enhance programmer productivity and simplify coding for newcomers. https://stability.ai/blog/stablecode-llm-generative-ai-coding
• OpenAI OpenAI has launched GPTBot, a new web crawler to improve future AI models like GPT-4 and GPT-5. GPTBot searches the web for useful data, learns from it, and uses that information to improve AI's accuracy and capabilities.
• 亚马逊 Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed that every team within the company is actively working on generative AI projects, spanning entertainment, AWS, advertising, and devices. Jassy expressed the importance of GenAI, saying it will be at the heart of operations and represent a significant investment and focus for the company. Amazon is also introducing an AI tool for its marketplace sellers to automatically generate product listing copy.
• 华特迪士尼公司 reportedly creates task force to explore AI applications across all of its businesses, with a focus on cutting costs, according to Reuters. Disney wants to use AI to reduce the steep price of TV and movie production, as well as power new advertising features and enhance customer support at its theme parks.
• IBM and NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration partner with Hugging Face to open source largest Geospatial AI Foundation Model to accelerate climate related discoveries ElevenLabs releases input streaming, allowing users to stream LLM responses and generate speech in real-time with sub-second latency
• 谷歌 and Universal Music Group (UMG) are in early talks to create an AI-generated music tool that would compensate artists and songwriters for their music, Financial Times reported. Fans could use AI to legally create tracks based on participating artists' voices, lyrics, and sounds. Google also shared it's working?lightweight, multimodal generative AI models for medical imaging. By "grafting" language-aligned vision encoders onto a fixed LLM, we are able to solve previously challenging tasks using an approach that they call ELIXR.

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

The future of computing according to 英伟达

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

CB Insights released their Generative AI 50, a list of promising gen AI companies

The political bias of LLM models

Consumer tech VC deal activity is on the retreat in Europe (source)?

?AudioLDM 2 - a powerful framework for generating audio, music, and speech that outperforms previous approaches

Want to see how you look as a Barbie? bairbie.me

That's all for this week! There's a lot to celebrate in our "small" community!

Keep on creating!

Eze Vidra