Weekly #FIRGUN Newsletter

It's #Firgun time.

The word "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". Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for someone else's accomplishments, good fortune, or well-being. More about Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p

The founder and CEO of Stripe , Partick Collison, posted a picture on X with the innocuous statement "Great to be back in Tel Aviv. I missed this run". That's great in general, and makes me wonder what Israeli startup he's about to buy, but that was enough for the trolls (including Paul Biggar) to threaten to boycott Stripe for his 'support of Israel'.

On a more positive note, yesterday marked the American holiday of Thanksgiving, my favourite US holiday and a great feast, but also a good reminder to be thankful (I wrote a short post about it here). I'm hopeful that the ceasefire in Lebanon agreed on this week will last, and that it marks hopefully the beginning of the end of this war. Never forget that there are still 101 Israelis held hos**ge in G**a. Including women and Children. It's not known how many are still alive. We must #BRINGTHEMHOME

During November, Israeli startups raised over $750M and we saw the creation of a new Unicorn (more on Eon below). There were also 7 exits reported, exceeding $1 billion. This would not be as impressive during 'normal times' in Israel, but the fact that we're seeing such level of activity in the middle of a war (with most airlines halting flights to Israel), this is not trivial. This is the highest volume of fundraising reported for November in the past 3 years (!)

In the wider tech world, Bitcoin nearly crossed the $100K mark, Anthropic raised another $4 billion(!) led by 亚马逊 , Elon Musk announced that xAI will launch a game studio, 亚马逊 developed a new AI model codenamed Olympus, focusing on advanced video and image processing capabilities and rumoured to launch next week, ElevenLabs launched GenFM, which enables the creation of podcasts from PDFs, articles or ebooks in the click of a button, 英伟达 launched the Fugatto AI music generator, Luma AI releases Photon image creator, claiming fastest generation speeds, 谷歌 launched GenChess, a game with customisable pieces using GenAI, 阿里巴巴集团 challenges ChatGPT's o1 with open-source reasoning model, Ai2 launches a fully open-source LLaMa competitor, and OpenAI suspended access to its video creation model Sora, after the model was leaked.

Today is 'Black Friday' - what bargains are you shopping for?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"True heroism is not about being fearless, but about being committed to something greater than yourself despite your fears." - Bryan Cranston

NEW FUNDING ROUNDS

• Congratulations Ofir Ehrlich and team Eon.io on securing a $70M series C bringing the total funding to $200M in one year, and the new unicorn status (at a $1.4 billion valuation), to enable automated management of cloud backups!
• Well done Omri Kohl and team Pyramid Analytics on your $50M series E extension for your next gen analytics solution for the enterprise!
• Way to go Maor Sason and team Appcharge on your $26M series A to help gaming companies keep more of their in-app-purchases revenue!
• Great stuff Dean Leitersdorf and team Decart on your $25M series A (weeks after a $21M seed) at a $500M valuation, to pioneer scalable, cost efficient generative AI training!
• Mazel tov Ori Soen and team Montara on your $5.4M seed round to manage the data development lifecycle in one place!
• Good job Ohad Tarcic and team caVos Biotherapeutics on the $3.3M recent funding round to uncover the genetic base of extraordinary cancer resistance!

EXITS

No exits reported this week.

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER

ISRAEL

1. Israeli resilience tech - a new report by Viola Ventures
2. Israel to introduce self-driving buses on public roads
3. Israeli entrepreneurs create new airline to facilitate better connectivity with New York at an affordable price

GLOBAL

1. Finding alpha - why the best startups often buck the trends (by me on VC Cafe)
2. State of European tech - annual report by Atomico
3. AI can now create a replica of your personality - A two-hour interview is enough to accurately capture your values and preferences, according to new research from Stanford and Google DeepMind - report by MIT Technology Review

MEDIA OF THE WEEK

Making lemonade from lemons. How the current war put Israeli Defence tech on the map (report by Viola)

Patrick's tame post on Israel.

And then the trolls came after him...

The most successful startups buck the trends (more on my VC Cafe post)

The AI data center value chain (by CB Insights )

Cursor is an AI coding platform. It grew revenues by 6400% from $1M in November 2023 to to $65M today in just one year.

AI is already making an impact on jobs (automating customer support for example) and cost reduction. One example of this was made clear this week by Klarna who went 'all in' on integrating AI into its workflows.

Media tech is becoming hot again...

How to make an impact in a new job in your first 90 days (source)

European Member of Parliament Sarah Knafo gave a powerful speech on the rise of Antisemitism in France

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

Eze Vidra

#tech #israel #startups #vc #venturecapital #innovation #exits #generativeAI #venture