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.

Yesterday was a fun day for us at Remagine Ventures as we published the updated landscape of Israeli generative AI startups (scroll down for the infographic). In our research, Kevin Baxpehler , Amit Revivo and I found that the number of startups more than doubled since the last version released in April that that Israeli Gen AI startups raised $2.3 billion to date. Not bad for ChatGPT being out less than a year. Shana tova and Gmar Hatima Tova to you all.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." — Bill Gates

NEW INVESTMENT ROUNDS

- Big respect Shlomo Kramer and team Cato Networks on your $238M series G at $3 billion valuation for your full network security solution!

- Mabruk Ronni Zehavi and team HiBob on your $150M series E at $2.7 billion valuation for your modern HR management platform!

- Congratulations Roni Fuchs and team Legit Security on your $40M series B to protect software supply chains from attack - from code to cloud!

- Kudos Evyatar Ben Artzi and team Darrow AI on securing a $35M series B to help lawyers discover new cases with the power of AI!

- There's always a first, so congrats Gal Gadot Varsano on raising $13M for Goodless , a new Mac and Cheese brand for adults!

- Way to go David Lazerson and team Briya on your $11.5M series A to provide a blockchain-secured platform for hospitals and life sciences companies to share data!

- Kol hakavod Leeor Solnik and team qbiq on your $10M seed round for your AI powered platform for real estate planning and visualisation!

- Mazel tov Nir Ayalon and team Cydome on your $8M series A to prevent maritime cyber threats!

- Well done Dotan Eshet and team Treetoscope on your $7M seed round for your precision irrigation agtech platform!

EXITS

- Mabruk Idan Ninyo and team Bionic, a CrowdStrike Company on the $350M acquisition by CrowdStrike of your application security posture management product!

It's a good place to mention that Israeli cyber has seen $2.8 billion worth of exits in 7 months! I am holding up for the confirmation of the rumours Ofer Ben-Noon and team Talon (by Palo Alto Networks) :-)

- Congratulations Ore Gilron, Oshri Bienhaker and team Innplay Labs on the acquisition by Playtika for $80M with the ability to get to $300M - it sounds like a great result and well done on the journey!

- Well done Jonathan Gan and team Whichit on the undisclosed exit. I know it's not what you dreamed of, but I'm sure you've gained a lot from the journey!

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER:

1)?By me on VC Cafe :

• The new Israeli generative AI startup landscape
• 3 buckets of generative AI opportunities

2) "The number of generative AI startups in Israel has more than doubled in 6 months" - our updated landscape published in Calcalist ???????

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

• OpenAI announced the upcoming launch of Dall-e 3, maybe a Midjourney killer? Facing competition from many angles, OpenAI Hustles to BeatGoogle to Launch ‘Multimodal’ LLM. In addition, the company released a new GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct model. It’s particularly well-suited for applications requiring precise, task-oriented instructions.
• Google is adding extensions to Bard so you can connect it to your favourite Google apps including Gmail, Drive + Docs for even deeper collaboration. Google also introduced distilling step-by-step, a new resource-efficient mechanism for training smaller task-specific models that uses much less training data than required by standard fine-tuning or distillation approaches.
• YouTube goes all in on generative AI with new tools for creators.
• 微软 announced Copilot, their vision for an everyday AI companion "Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront".
• 甲骨文 Oracle Introduces Integrated Vector Database to Augment Generative AI and Dramatically Increase Developer Productivity
• 英特尔 has announced a new chip, called 'Meteor Lake', that will allow laptops to run generative artificial intelligence chatbots without relying on cloud data centers.
• 亚马逊 brings generative AI to Alexa“Our latest model has been specifically optimized for voice and the things we know our customers love — like having access to real-time information, efficiently controlling their smart home, and getting the most out of their home entertainment,” Dave Limp, the SVP of devices and services at Amazon, said onstage.
• Israeli startup Deci AI (Acquired by NVIDIA) created a new foundation model has comparable performance on benchmarks with Falcon 7B, MPT-7B, and Llama2 7B, but it’s about 4.8x faster than Llama 2 (on PyTorch) and 15x faster using their own inference SDK. It has 5.7B parameters and is open to download under the same license as Llama 2. Check it out.
• AI writing startup Writer , used by L'Oréal, Spotify, and Uber to create digital marketing campaigns, raised $100M led by Iconiq Growth at a $500M+ valuation (by Bloomberg)
• 摩根士丹利 Morgan Stanley plans to announce that an assistant it created with OpenAI’s latest software is “fully live” for financial advisors and their support staff.Called the AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant, the tool gives financial advisors speedy access to a database of about 100,000 research reports and documents.

Interesting reads:

• The future of the Internet - great read on the use of AI agents (h/t Itamar Weisbrod )
• The second act of generative AI, a revised thesis by Sequoia Capital (h/t Matias Concha Bidegain ).
• Related - Gen AI in healthcare, landscape and research
• Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman on Interactive AI, and what comes next after Gen AI
• The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority set out specific principles to help guide AI regulations and companies that develop the technology.

HOUSEKEEPING

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VIDEO OF THE WEEK

Tobias Lütke founder and CEO of Shopify on competing with 亚马逊 and how they inspire him to be better

CHARTS OF THE WEEK

We published the updated Israeli generative AI startup landscape and added it to our landscape collection for 2023

Sequoia's updated generative AI market map, and their view on Gen AI Act 2

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) tested the impacts of AI on its employees. Consultants using GPT-4 finished 12.2% more tasks, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results. (source)

The Applications & Ripple Effects of AI Automation (source)

Do Specialist venture funds perform better? PitchBook crunched the data (source)

Where do Unicorn founders come from? a study by Endeavor (source)

And a bit of comic relief for the end...

That's all for this week. Thank you for being a loyal reader - please share this newsletter so others can discover it.

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

Eze Vidra

#tech #startups #venturecapital #israel #generativeAI #genai #innovation