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.

Parents rejoice! The kids are back in school - I can imagine productivity in the market was already twice as high this week ;-)

My quote of the week is:

"Not all those who wander are lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring):

NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS

- Congratulations Peter Reynolds , Mark Gazit and team ThetaRay on your $57M series D to prevent financial crime with your AI anomaly detection solution!

- Kudos Joseph (Yossi) Mossel and team Ibex Medical Analytics on securing a $55M series C for your AI-powered cancer diagnostics, capable of detecting more than 100 different cancer and non-cancer pathologies!

- Mabruk? Amiram Shachar and team Upwind Security on your $50M series A to bring Runtime Security to the cloud!

- Well done Cem Kent and team? Harmonya on your $20M series A to assist retailers with AI-powered product data

- Way to go Tzvika Shneider and team? Pynt on your $6M seed round for your API security solution!

EXITS

- Congratulations Shai Morag and team Tenable Israel on the $265M acquisition of your cloud security platform by Tenable !

- Mazel tov Aner Gelman and team Atmosec (Acquired by Check Point) on the acquisition of your SaaS security company by Check Point Software for an undisclosed sum!

NEW FUNDS

- Congratulations Ittai Harel and team Pitango Health on the first closing of your second fund, targeting $175M to invest in early stage Israeli health tech startups

- Well done Jonathan Berger and team The Kitchen Hub on unveiling a $70M fund to invest in Israeli foodtech companies!

APPOINTMENTS

- Kudos Omer Bohbot on being appointed to junior partner role at Champel Capital

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER:

1)?Funding was very tricky across the board in the first half of 2023, but gaming investments specifically were down 81%. In my latest post on VC Cafe I shared the latest gaming investment stats and advice for gaming founders raising in this environment

2) Positivity breeds success. Ahead of the Rosh Hashanah, I was interviewed by Chabad.org for the "Soul and Spirit" Magazine. You can find the interview here and here.

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

• Anthropic launched its Claude Pro paid tier, with 5x more usage than the free tier provides for $20 a month. Once it became clear that OpenAI is making over $80M revenue per month, the race is on.
• Meta keeps hitting hard, releasing "open source" models and AI research. The latest include PUG (Photo realistic Unreal Graphics), CM3Leon - a groundbreaking multimodal model setting new standards in text-to-image synthesis with optimal efficiency, Dino V2 - evaluating the fairness of computer vision models, Nougat - a visual transformer for OCR aiming to convert scientific PDFs into markup language and more....
• Canva released a ChatGPT plugin offering 'text to design'. Once the plugin is installed, graphics can be generated from a text prompt on ChatGPT, and then edited directly in Canva using the link provided.
• Technology Innovation Institute released Falcon180B, the largest open source LLM to date, a 3.5 trillion tokens LLM outperforming Llama 2 and on par with Google's PaLM 2
• 苹果 has been expanding its spend on AI research to millions of dollars a day. One of its goals is to develop computing budget for building artificial intelligence to millions of features such as one that allows iPhone customers to use simple voice commands to automate tasks involving multiple steps, according to people familiar with the effort.

Interesting reads:

• Seth Rosenberg from Greylock on Product Led AI - by combining expertise in products and domains with a fundamental understanding of human behavior and AI, these builders will bring defensible, valuable AI-first products to life.
• What does OpenAI really want? - to change EVERYTHING. New in depth interview of the company's leadership in WIRED
• Will AI accelerate SaaS Adoption? - Christoph Janz of Point Nine makes an interesting case on what AI enables to improve user experience
• AI-generated art cannot receive copyrights, US court says - interesting implications for startups
• Let’s Get Personal: Why AI Will Unlock a Massive Market for Online Consumer Services - by Andreessen Horowitz
• My ex colleague Adam Ghobarah on the 5 challenges AI entrepreneurs have to overcome (the last two are less obvious)

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

David O. Sacks on whether the AI boom will end up like the Telecom Crash

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

New media universe map by Evan Shapīro (source)

TIME's new cover: The 100 most influential people in AI

Global generative AI investment up to July 2023

And where did that money go by category...

The % of venture investment in the US going to AI startups is growing (source)

Google DeepMind released artist-created images and animations about artificial intelligence (AI) made freely available online

If this is how you feel about going back to work after the summer break, it's time to change jobs!

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

Eze Vidra

#Firgun?#startups #genai #israel #vc #venturecapital