This week’s dispatch captures a market moving in two directions at once.

Israeli tech showed its enduring strength in cybersecurity, with three startups emerging from stealth after raising a combined $340 million. But the same week brought another painful wave of layoffs, including monday.com cutting 20% of its workforce. AI-driven automation is part of the story, but so is the unusually strong shekel, which is increasing dollar-denominated costs and shortening runways for Israeli companies.

Globally, the pace is only accelerating. Travis Kalanick returned with a $1.7 billion physical-AI venture, Chinese models Kimi K3 and Qwen3.8-Max shook up the AI leaderboards, and another wave of multibillion-dollar infrastructure commitments and mega-rounds showed that capital continues to concentrate around AI.

Also in this week’s dispatch: what H1 2026 funding data reveals about the next startup opportunities, Israel’s fast-growing vertical-AI landscape, the foreign investors backing Israeli founders, and why record funding totals are masking a worrying decline in the number of new startups getting funded.

Plenty to unpack. Let’s dive in.

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Weekly #FIRGUN Newsletter Israeli tech showed its enduring strength in cybersecurity, Travis is back with $1.7 billion in funding for Atoms and Chinese open source models are getting more popular, while OpenAI's latest model goes rouge and hacks Hugging Face Read article

Vertical AI Market Map 2026: Israeli Startups and Funding Rounds $716M went to just 24 Israeli vertical AI startups in H1 2026 Fintech and insuretech was the broadest category, followed by healthcare Defence tech and public infrastructure attracted the highest dollar amounts Read article

Requests for Startups: Fall 2026 Edition Both Remagine Ventures and Y Combinator revealed their latest 'RFS' (requests for startups) - what are investors looking to back in the summer of 2026? Read article

Chart of the week

Israel continues to punch far above its weight.

This week’s Dealroom and Accel report places Israel first for the number of unicorns created across Europe and Israel. It is another reminder that the ecosystem’s advantage is not its size, but its extraordinary density of technical talent, repeat founders and globally ambitious companies.

That’s all for this week.

The headlines may swing between record rounds and painful layoffs, but underneath them is a more important shift: AI is changing what startups can build, how quickly they can build it and how many people they need along the way. The opportunity is enormous, but the bar for differentiation, distribution and durable value is rising just as quickly.

As always, keep building, keep supporting one another and keep spreading the #FIRGUN.

Eze