Hi everyone,

This week in Israeli tech was about concentration: fewer companies, bigger rounds, and a very clear investor appetite for the infrastructure layer of AI.

Israeli startups announced more than $866 million in new funding this week, led by Cyera’s $600 million Series G at a $12 billion valuation. The common thread was not “AI” in the generic sense, but the harder layers around AI adoption: data security, cloud and AI cost control, enterprise context, offensive security, cloud enforcement, and autonomous data management.

It was also a week of contrasts. Israel started the week under rocket fire from Iran, but the ecosystem kept building, fundraising and showing up. I spent the week in Tel Aviv meeting founders and portfolio companies, and was reminded again of the energy of this “small” community: ambitious, direct, resilient and very much still in motion.

Globally, the biggest tech story was Anthropic’s release of Claude Fable 5, a public Mythos-class model built for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work, alongside the more restricted Claude Mythos 5 for approved customers. The launch captured where frontier AI is heading: more capable agents, more complicated release strategies, and much bigger questions around safety, transparency and trust. Around it, the AI infrastructure arms race continued: Google, Apple, Nvidia, OpenAI, SpaceX, KKR and Anthropic were all in the headlines for compute, models, data centers, agentic commerce and IPO momentum.

And because the World Cup kicked off this week, I chose a sports quote for the #FIRGUN edition:

Recent articles

Weekly #FIRGUN Newsletter – June 12 2026 This week’s #FIRGUN celebrates the new Israeli funding rounds from Cyera, Rylo, PointFive, A Security, Aryon Security, Pi Security, Jedify and Upriver, plus the big AI stories in the wider tech world and a World Cup-themed quote of the week. Read article

Quantum Computing’s Venture Moment: Is Now the Right Time to Invest? Quantum is moving from science project to investable category. In this post, I look at why now might be the right time, what is still missing, and why Israel could become an important startup hub in the next computing race. Read article

Agentic AI: Picks and Shovels vs. the Gold Itself Agentic AI is really two different bets: infrastructure and vertical applications. This post breaks down where the value may sit, and why token costs, non-determinism, evaluation, reliability and security will decide who survives. Read article

Israel’s Space-Tech Moment: From Beresheet to Space-Based AI Space is no longer just about rockets. It is becoming infrastructure for AI, defence, climate intelligence, communications, mining, science and the next generation of computing. Israel has a real shot to play a role. Read article

Israel continues to punch above its weight in global tech.

With shockingly few people in the U.S., Israel is the #2 country of origin for foreign unicorn founders.