The original version of Firgun was published on LinkedIn. Subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.

In case you’re new here, the word “Firgun” (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” (which stands for being happy for someone else’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for members of our community’s accomplishments, good fortune and wins. More about the concept of Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p. In November #FIRGUN officially celebrated 5 years. See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can find previous editions on my blog, VC Cafe.

The US and Iran agreed (in principle) a two-week ceasefire. It’s too early to tell if it will stick, and the tech ecosystem remains on high alert with the fighting in Lebanon still going on. As one journalist put it, we’re used to to wars that look like movies, with a clear beginning, middle and ending. Roaring Lion, however, is more like a TV series and we just finished season two. The big story in tech this week is that AI21 Labs, an Israeli AI unicorn founded by Prof. Yoav Shoham and Prof Amnon Shaashua is in talks to be acquired by Nebius after M&A talks with NVIDIA faltered. The deal is not yet closed. Israel celebrated Passover this week so it’s a bit quieter on the tech front.

In the wider tech world, the AI arms race officially entered a new gear. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google took the unusual step of publicly joining forces through the Frontier Model Forum to share intelligence and clamp down on Chinese labs “distilling” their frontier models. Anthropic also announced project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative that will use its Claude Mythos Preview model to help find and fix software vulnerabilities as well as ‘Managed Agents‘ a moved viewed by many as an OpenClaw killer. OpenAI has officially entered the media business by acquiring TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network), the acquisition signals a shift from building tools to owning the platforms that explain them. Meta debuted Muse Spark (code-named Avocado), the first major model out of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Google put Gemma 4, it’s lightweight model, available to run locally on people’s phones, without need for connectivity. China’s Z.ai released GLM-5.1 as new open-source coding leader. An open source project from actress Milla Jovovich and Ben Sigman called MemPalace claims 100% on LongMemEval, a level no model or agent has reached. Hermeus, the Atlanta-based hypersonics startup, closed a $350 million round to build unmanned hypersonic fighters, extending the defense-tech momentum into aerospace.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Roaring Lion was a significant operation, but success isn’t binary” –

Amit Segal, Chief political commentator for Channel 12 News

NEW FUNDING ROUNDS

• Way to go Israel Duanis and team Linx Security on your $50M series B to manage Identity Governance & Administration in an AI world!
• Well done Hasan Abasi and team HAAT Delivery on securing $20M series C to continue expandig your food delivery services!
• Congratulations Guy Raz and team Q-Factor on coming out of stealth with a $24M seed round to move Quantum computing beyond current qubit constraints with neutral atom technology!
• Kudos Ravit Netzer and team Scala Biodesign on your $16M series A to accelerate AI driven drug development!

EXITS

• Congrats Phil Bullinger and team Infinidat on the acquisition by Lenovo, estimated at $500M

NEW FUNDS

• Congratulations Lior Susan and team Eclipse on securing $1.3 billion across two new funds to accelerate the reinvention of physical industries!

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER

REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE

• I was out of office for the holiday so ICYMI: $3.1 Billion Under Missile Fire: What Q1 2026 Tells Us About Israeli Tech’s Real Resilience

ISRAEL

• Nebius in talks to acquire AI21 Labs – by Globes
• Iran-Linked Password-Spraying Campaign Targets 300+ Israeli Microsoft 365 Organizations
• Playtika mulls strategic options including a sale…

GLOBAL

• Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Mysterious Bitcoin inventor is ‘unmasked’ as British cryptographer who invented HashCash
• Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? The New Yorker digs into Sam Altman with 18-month investigation New Yorker published a 40-page investigation based on internal documents, notes from Ilya Sutskever, 200 pages from Dario Amodei, and 100+ interviews.
• Where is the money flowing in Enterprise AI – research by Andreessen Horowitz

MEDIA OF THE WEEK

Enterprises are using AI today for coding, legal, support, healthcare, and more. Deep dive by Kimberly Tan (source)

The opportunity in vertical AI by Menlo Ventures (source)

VC-backed companies in agentic AI raised over $24 billion across more than 1,300 deals—equivalent to 73% of all dollars in the space from 2015 through 2024, according to our analyst note. The rapid rise means we’ve turned the corner from experimentation to deployment. (source)

Semi is a one-player game. Apps is a two-player game. Infra is the only competitive layer. The most profitable strategy in AI is still selling the shovels. Report by Apoorv Agrawal (source)

Office of the CFO tech landscape by i5invest (source)

Where do LLMs mostly go for answers…

That’s all for this week. Let’s hope for a quiet weekend. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community. Keep on creating!

Shabbat shalom,

Eze Vidra

It’s #Firgun time!

In case you’re new here, the word “Firgun” (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” (which stands for being happy for someone else’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for members of our community’s accomplishments, good fortune and wins. More about the concept of Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p. In November #FIRGUN officially celebrated 5 years. See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can find previous editions on my blog, VC Cafe.

In Israel, the week was marked by Passover under fire. As Operation Roaring Lion entered its second month, Israelis sat down for their Seder on Wednesday night only to be sent running to shelters as Iran launched its largest ballistic missile barrage in weeks, with at least 10 missiles targeting central Israel across multiple salvos throughout the evening. Hezbollah joined with some 100 rockets toward the Galilee. Families paused Passover cooking and cleaning to rush to safe rooms multiple times throughout the day; in Tel Aviv, a parking garage under a mall was transformed into a makeshift Seder hall with folding tables, string lights, and matzoh. Despite it all, Israelis marked the festival of freedom this year, with a deeper resonance than most. Chag sameach!

In the wider tech world, OpenAI closed a record $122B round at an $852B valuation, with Amazon ($50B), NVIDIA ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B) anchoring, and revealed it now generates $2B/month in revenue with 900M weekly ChatGPT users. SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO targeting a $1.75T valuation and a June listing, which would be the largest public offering in history. NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration‘s Artemis II lifted off on April 1, sending four astronauts on a 10-day flyby of the Moon, humanity’s first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years. Google released Gemma 4, its most capable open-source models yet, with multimodal support, 256K context windows, and Apache 2.0 licensing. Mistral AI secured $830M in debt financing to buy 13,800 Nvidia GPUs for a Paris data center, with ARR now past $400M and targeting $1B by year-end. Oracle cut around 30,000 jobs to redirect spending toward AI data center infrastructure. Cisco unveiled a Zero Trust framework for securing autonomous AI agents at RSA 2026. Crunchbase reported Q1 2026 shattered all records with $297B invested globally, 80% of it in AI, and foundational AI funding alone doubled all of 2025 in a single quarter.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

The message of Passover remains as urgent as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.”

— Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

NEW FUNDING ROUNDS

• Congratulations Yodar Shafrir and team ScaleOps on securing $130M series C to advance autonomous AI infrastructure management!
• Kudos Itamar Friedman and team Qodo on raising a $70 series B to fight against AI slope in the coding world!
• Well done Daphna Langer and team Voltify on securing a $30M seed round to electrify freight rail!
• Way to go Itai Gafni and team Huskeys for coming out of stealth with an $8M seed round for your modern edge security management (ESM) platform!
• Mazel tov Tal Hoffman and team Enclave on coming out stealth with a $6M seed round to help developers ship code with confidence by eliminating security bottlenecks!
• Kol hakavod Uri Oron and team NovaLink Space on securing an undisclosed seed round to provide optical satellite communication systems intended for space-based data relay purposes!

EXITS

• Big congrats Eyal Ben Shalom and team Adge.AI on the acquisition of your AI platform to automate marketing decisions across major platforms by Publicis Groupe for a reported $100M!
• Well done Bruno Guez and team Revelator on the acquisition of your music distribution platform by Warner Music Group for an undisclosed sum!

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER

REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE

• $3.1 Billion Under Missile Fire: What Q1 2026 Tells Us About Israeli Tech’s Real Resilience – the Q1 reports are out, including the impact of operations Lion’s Roar on the tech ecosystem

ISRAEL

• The Israel Innovation Authority published the High-Tech Survey Amidst the War, surveying 637 tech CEOs
• The 2025 Tel Aviv Ecosystem report by Dealroom.co – $46 billion. That’s how much value Tel Aviv’s tech ecosystem generated in exits in 2025 alone. This year, Tel Aviv climbed to #4 in the Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking -surpassing Boston and Beijing.
• Israeli tech startups raise $3.1b in first quarter – by Globes ?????

GLOBAL

• Q1 2026 early stage funding report by Carta
• The AI-Native Services Playbook – by Emergence Capital
• Q1 2026 shatters all records as AI pushes startup investments to $300 billion – by Crunchbase

MEDIA OF THE WEEK

The Tel Aviv tech ecosystem 2025 snapshot. $14.1B raised in 2025 (+77% YoY) and $46B in exits in 2025 a record year.

For context: that’s more than the GDP of countries like Iceland, Luxembourg, or Paraguay – generated by a startup ecosystem in a metro area smaller than Atlanta.

And the ecosystem keeps expanding:

* 2,600+ active tech companies

* 190 multinational corporations (+12%)

* 23 new international R&D centers launched in 2025

* 422 venture capital investors active in the ecosystem

* Foreign investors accounted for 61% of total funding

Israeli data centre infrastructure map by Grove Ventures (source)

According to the report, Israeli tech companies raised $3.1 billion in 98 rounds, a 34% increase in capital raised, with no change in the number of deals compared to Q1/2025. (source)

The Bessemer Venture Partners AI Infrastructure Roadmap explores five tech frontiers identified in 2026: from continual learning systems that evolve in production to world models that simulate physical reality, and production-scale inference to reinforcement learning platforms that teach AI through experience. (source)

Should AI agents get a bank account? Or a credit card? Here’s the agentic AI payment ecosystem by Norwest (source)

Q1 2026 broke records in funding (source)

How much ARR do you need to raise? no one knows!

That’s all for this week, thank you for reading. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!

Chag Pesach Sameach, and Happy Easter!

Eze Vidra

“If you will it, it is no dream.”

Israeli tech just posted a $3.1 billion quarter. That’s a 34% jump over Q1 2025, according to preliminary data from IVC and LeumiTech. Include undisclosed rounds, and the number climbs to roughly $3.6 billion. By any standard, that’s a strong opening to the year.

But here’s the thing: many of those rounds were raised under missile fire.

Four weeks into Operation Roaring Lion, the Israel Innovation Authority surveyed 637 tech company CEOs and founders. The picture that emerges is a sector that’s simultaneously thriving on paper and straining at the seams. As a VC investing in Israeli startups from day one, I think the tension between these two data sets is the real story of Q1.

Imagine the calendar of a startup CEO. Talking to customers, employees, investors, working on strategy, execution and product launches.

Now add 3-6 alarms per day… each one sounding because of a ballistic rocket hurling from thousands of kilometres away. Not only it’s stressful and intense, but also extremely disruptive to business.

Strong numbers, real pressure underneath

The IVC-LeumiTech data paints an optimistic picture: 98 funding rounds, early-stage investment surging 164% since late 2023 to reach $1.3 billion (42% of total funding), and cybersecurity commanding 40% of all capital raised. GenAI held steady at around 16%.

But the Innovation Authority survey reveals the operational cost of that resilience. Among those 637 companies: 71% reported that the war impacted their fundraising processes, with 37% experiencing delays, 23% saying investors postponed decisions, and 11% seeing processes cancelled outright.

Only 11% of companies reported zero employee absences. 48% reported that more than a quarter of their workforce was absent, driven by safety restrictions (35%), lack of childcare or educational frameworks (33%), and reserve duty (11%). 87% reported delays in product development or hitting milestones, with 42% experiencing significant delays. And 75% were impacted by restrictions on international flights, making it harder to meet customers, attend conferences, and close deals.

Perhaps most concerning for the long term: 31% of companies said the situation has led them to consider relocating operations abroad, with 80% of those being companies that operate primarily in international markets. Another 9% considered it but decided against it. And 12% said that if the security situation continues for another month, it could result in their company closing, a figure that climbs to 17% among the smallest startups (up to 10 employees).

The money is flowing, but it’s concentrating

Based on the preliminary Q1 2026 IVC report, the top decile of rounds accounted for 51% of all capital raised in Q1. The number of deals stayed flat compared to Q1 2025, meaning the increase in total funding is driven by a handful of very large rounds rather than a broad-based expansion.

Mid-stage is weakening. Series B and C captured only 29% of total funding, continuing a trend that started before the war. Defense tech, which spiked to over 8% of funding in 2025, dropped below 1% in Q1 2026.

The capital is clearly there, but the distribution tells a more nuanced story than the top-line number alone.

Europe’s absence is a missed opportunity on both sides

An analysis published in CTech adds another layer to this picture. Looking at roughly 280 top Israeli companies and every seed round above $10 million since 2023, the data reveals that 86% of Israel’s largest seed rounds have zero European VC participation. Only about 7% have a European independent venture fund as an investor.

For comparison, roughly 62% of these same companies have a US venture fund on their cap table, and about 72% have an Israeli one. The list of absent European names is striking: Atomico, Balderton, Northzone, EQT Ventures, Creandum, Lakestar, Earlybird, HV Capital, Cherry Ventures, Elaia, Sofina, and Kinnevik, collectively managing over $25 billion, appear on none of these cap tables. Not once in five years.

This matters now more than ever. With Israeli companies under operational stress and actively looking at international expansion (or relocation), European VCs could be natural partners. But the relationships and pattern recognition simply aren’t there. Israeli deal flow features companies raising $10-75 million seeds at $100M+ post-money valuations, a profile that doesn’t match the typical European seed playbook of $3-5M rounds in Berlin or Stockholm.

Meanwhile, foreign investors still accounted for 65.9% of fundraising activity in Q1 2026, though that share is gradually declining as local funds take a slightly larger role in early rounds.

What does this mean for founders and investors?

If you’re a founder raising right now, the data suggests a bifurcated market. Capital is available, especially if you’re in cyber or AI and can command a large round. But if you’re mid-stage, need to travel for business development, or are dealing with team absences due to reserve duty, you’re facing real headwinds that the headline numbers don’t capture.

If you’re an investor, the Innovation Authority data is a reminder that the operational reality on the ground is more complicated than funding tallies suggest. 89% of surveyed companies haven’t placed employees on furlough, and the sector is making a conscious effort to avoid sharp cuts. But 22% have already significantly delayed product launches or milestones, and 18% expect to downsize operations or personnel if the situation continues. The IIA itself notes that while the sector demonstrated impressive recovery after Iron Swords and Operation Rising Lion, this prolonged security situation may require different solutions.

The resilience is real and remarkable. But it shouldn’t be taken for granted.

For European VCs specifically, this may be a moment to reconsider the Israel gap. The companies emerging from this period battle-tested, capital-efficient, and looking for international partnerships could be exactly the kind of founders worth backing. But building that conviction requires showing up now, not after the next unicorn exit.

It’s #Firgun time!

In case you’re new here, the word “Firgun” (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” (which stands for being happy for someone else’s misfortune). Firgun is all about genuinely feeling and expressing happiness, pride, or admiration for members of our community’s accomplishments, good fortune and wins. More about the concept of Firgun and why it matters on VC Cafe: https://lnkd.in/dg2a86p. In November #FIRGUN officially celebrated 5 years. See my update on what I’ve learned from writing Firgun and what keeps me going. If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can find previous editions on my blog, VC Cafe.

Necessity is the mother of invention. While there’s nothing fun about being attacked with hypersonic rockets, cluster bombs and UAVs, Israeli developers launched a wave of wartime mini-sites and hyper-local dashboards to manage the tension of the current escalation. Beyond the serious tools like the Home Front Command app and RocketAlert.live, we’ve seen the rise of Shelter Tech: from Who’s Single in the Shelter icebreakers via the The Hooked App (which uses QR codes at bunker entrances) to Am I Safe to Shower? risk-calculators that cross-reference real-time interception data with your average scrub time. Whether it’s funny dashboards tracking how long did you spend in the safe room or volunteer platforms like Purple Vest helping the elderly reach safety, or the “Iron Hedgehog” game simulating intercepting Iranian rockets with Iron Dome, this week proved that even under fire, the ecosystem’s first instinct is to build, iterate, and find a reason to smile (powered by vibe coding).

In the wider tech world, it was a week of dramatic plot twists and headline-grabbing moves across the AI landscape. OpenAI shut down its Sora video generation app just six months after launch, losing a $1 billion The Walt Disney Company licensing deal in the process, while simultaneously raising an additional $10B (bringing its latest round to ~$120B) and revealing early development of its next model, codenamed “Spud“. Since the start of 2026, OpenAI has already made six acquisitions nearly matching all of last year adding Astral (Python tooling) and Promptfoo (AI testing) among the recent additions. Google DeepMind launched TurboQuant, a quantization algorithm to enable massive compression of LLMs and vector search engines without sacrificing accuracy. Google also launched Lyria 3, an advanced AI music generation tool. Arm unveiled the AGI CPU, its first-ever in-house chip after 35 years of only licensing designs. It’s a 136-core, 3nm data center processor built for AI inference, with Meta as launch customer and OpenAI, Cerebras, Cloudflare, and SAP also signed on. Anthropic launched computer use in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, letting Claude control your Mac remotely to complete tasks while you’re away. Anthropic also announced Claude Code “auto mode” that enables Claude Code to make permission-level decisions while preventing destructive actions like mass file deletion/ Defense AI startup Shield AI raised $2B at a $12.7B valuation, more than doubling its value from a year ago. Mistral AI launched Voxtral TTS, its first text-to-speech model, as it expands from text generation into voice infrastructure for AI agents. AI unicorn Sierra launched ‘agents as a service‘ for customer support. Epic Games cut 1,000+ jobs, saying it is “spending significantly more” than it is making. AI from China continues to make progress: lower-cost Chinese AI models made by companies such as DeepSeek AI and MiniMax have overtaken their US rivals in token consumption since February, according to OpenRouter. ByteDance launched its Dreamina AI Seedance 2.0 audio and video model in its CapCut editing platform.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“The strength of a nation is the strength of its people.” — Golda Meir

NEW FUNDING ROUNDS

• Congratulations Tal Kreisler and team NoTraffic on your $90M series C to transform urban mobility by leveraging AI to optimize traffic management systems!
• Well done Aviv Nahum and team Above Security on your $43M series A (and previously undisclosed $7M seed funding) on coming out of stealth for your insider risk management platform built around narrative intelligence!
• Way to go Rafael Broshi and team Notch on your $30M series A to manage real-life support, regulated workflows, sensitive data, and enterprise compliance at scale for regulated industries like insurance!
• Kudos Elad Ben Meir and team Onit Security on your $11M seed round to tackle vulnerability management!
• Mabruk Matan Goldner and team Conntour on your $7M seed round for real-time video intelligence analysis, allowing natural language search on CCTV footage.
• Good stuff Amiram Shachar and team Upwind Security on the rumours you’ve raised “tens of millions” in new strategic funding to create an independent alternative to Wiz…

EXITS

• No exits recorded this week

LINKS FOR YOUR BROWSER

REMAGINE VENTURES/ VC CAFE

• The bar has moved: what does pre-seed mean in 2026: building is no longer the hard, it never really was. Investors are asking: do you understand who has this problem badly enough to pay for a solution? Do you have a distribution insight, a specific, believable reason why customers will find you? Is there data, community, or customer intimacy baked into your model that compounds over time and gets harder to replicate?
• The AI Agent wars and what founders and investors need to know – OpenClaw ranks ninth overall on GitHub, only 60 days after it was introduced. It’s hard to find a Mac Mini to buy in the US as agentic AI is taking the market by storm… what are the alternatives out there?
• The State of Israeli Pre-Seed in 2025: What the Data Says (and How It Compares to the US) – we at Remagine Ventures participated in a survey on the state of pre-seed investments in Israel by Fusion VC, this post is my analysis and a comparison with the US data released by Carta and Crunchbase.

ISRAEL

• The 2025 pre-seed investment landscape report by Fusion VC
• The compounding tax – every time there’s an alarm in Israel, warning of impending rockets, the cortisol levels go up and the fight or flight mechanism is triggered. Alex Oppenheimer points out that this is normal, and it has a price.
• Startup Nation’ under fire: how Israel’s tech sector keeps operating during war- War strains Israel’s tech sector as workers juggle war, reserves and disruptions, but industry pushes to maintain operations and reassure global clients

GLOBAL

• The 2026 global market update by Redpoint – In the last three technological changes, more than 60% of value was created by companies founded in years 4–6 after the seminal moment. According to Redpoint, now we’re at the best time to invest.
• Report: The State Of AI In Europe by Prosus and Dealroom.co and related The 2026 European Deep Tech report.
• Seed funding hasn’t stalled, but it’s skewing larger and is more competitive than ever, by Crunchbase

MEDIA OF THE WEEK

Benchmarks on size and valuation of Israeli pre seed in 2025 (see source in links section)

AI-Native Services market map by Emergence Capital

Wealth management is at an inflection point: $83T in generational wealth is changing hands, clients are expecting more from their advisors, and the opportunity for technology to step in has never been bigger. Landscape by Insight Partners (source)

Robotics data infrastructure map by Boost VC

The AI-first GTM Tech Stack by Battery Ventures

A new CAMERA analysis found BBC , CNN , NBC News and The New York Times used the phrase “war crime” 32 times in the first three weeks of the U.S./Israel-Iran war. 88% of those applications were directed solely toward the actions of the United States and/or Israel.

Zero were directed solely toward the actions of the Islamic Republic of Iran. (source)

spot on.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading. Stay safe out there. There’s a lot to celebrate in our “small” community! Keep on creating!

Eze Vidra

That’s why we’re glad Fusion VC keeps publishing their annual Israeli Pre-Seed Report, now in its third year. At Remagine Ventures, we participated in the survey, as one of the most active pre-seed funds in Israel in 2025, and the data is very consistent with what we see day to day.

The report draws on data from 70 of the most active Israeli investors (37 VCs and 33 angels) and over 1,000 pre-seed companies. Below, we break down the key findings and put them in context alongside US benchmarks from Carta and Crunchbase.

The Macro Picture: Asymmetry Everywhere

Before diving into the Israeli data, it’s worth understanding the global backdrop.

In the US, seed funding didn’t stall in 2025, it bifurcated dramatically. US seed funding totalled $19.4B in 2025, according to Crunchbase, but deal counts and amounts in the $200K–$5M range were down roughly 20% year over year.

Only the upper bands grew: roughly 1 in 10 seed deals were $10M or more, outlier rounds of $50M+ surged over 300%, and 51% of all seed dollars flowed into deals of $10M and above (up from a third in 2024). The largest seed round of the year was $2B. Since 2018, seed rounds of $200K–$5M have shrunk from 70% of all seed funding to just 26%.

There’s more concentration in rounds. As I previously mentioned in February 2026, Less deals are being made, with larger amounts deployed.

According to Carta’s State of Pre-seed 2025 report, US startups raised $10.4B across 50,316 SAFEs and convertible notes in 2025. That’s a 1% decline in total cash invested versus 2024 — but a 13% decline in the number of instruments issued. Capital is concentrating into fewer, larger deals.

Where is all that money going? AI. Over 42% of all global seed funding in 2025 went to AI-focused companies (up from 30% in 2024), with more than $15B flowing into AI seed rounds alone. The Fusion report makes a similar observation: 50% of all US venture capital in 2025 was invested in just 1% of companies, and 70% went to the top 5%.

Israel mirrors this asymmetry. Cybersecurity companies raised approximately $4.4B across 130 rounds in 2025, accounting for 32% of all Israeli tech investment. For the first time, US funds invested more in Israeli cybersecurity than local funds did, even at the seed stage. The total number of funding rounds in Israel has declined steadily from 1,181 in 2021 to a projected 415 in 2025. The money is there, but it’s flowing to fewer companies.

This is what the Fusion report aptly calls “Consensus Capital”, mega-funds deploying large checks into perceived safe bets, pushing round sizes and valuations to all-time highs while leaving a shrinking number of deals for everyone else.

Israeli Pre-Seed by the Numbers

The core benchmarks from the Fusion report paint a clear picture of a market that’s maturing and getting more competitive.

Post-money SAFEs are now the default, with nearly two-thirds of VCs using them exclusively at pre-seed. In Israel, 64% of VCs and 69% of angels invest exclusively via SAFE, up sharply from prior years. In the US, Carta reports that the majority of early-stage rounds under $4M were completed using SAFEs or convertible notes in 2025, and SAFE valuation caps rose across deal sizes throughout the year.

Round sizes crossed $1M for the first time. The median pre-seed round is now $1M, with more than half of rounds landing in the $1.1M–$1.75M range. At the 75th percentile, rounds reach $1.25M–$1.45M. Founders are raising more, but they’re also expected to do more with it, and faster.

Valuations keep climbing, especially at the top. The median post-money valuation cap is $6.8M, up roughly 14% from 2024. But the real movement is in highly competitive deals: top-decile valuations jumped 17% to $13.5M (up from $11.5M), and the share of VCs investing at $15M+ caps grew sixfold to 18%. A two-track market is emerging, standard deals holding steady around $5M–$6M, while competitive rounds with serial founders or hot sectors command $10M–$15M+.

How Israel Compares to the US

This is where the data gets particularly interesting for founders thinking about where and how to raise.

The Fusion report itself flags the comparison: Israeli pre-seed remains priced at a 30%–40% discount to the US market. On Carta, the post-money SAFE with a valuation cap and no discount is now the standard US pre-seed instrument, with median caps hovering around $10M for rounds in the $250K–$1M range and $15M for rounds in the $1M–$2.5M range. In Israel, the median valuation cap sits at $6.8M, and even upper-quartile competitive deals only reach about $10M. The gap is persistent and significant.

Overall, Israeli pre-seed remains 30-40% cheaper than comparable rounds in the US.

An interesting structural difference: in the US, hardware and biotech/pharma emerged as the second and third largest pre-seed categories by total cash raised in 2025, a shift from 2024.

In Israel, Enterprise SaaS/AI remains dominant (62% of VC investments), but Fintech & Insurance surged to second place (38%), followed by Consumer (30%, a 100% increase from 2024). The Israeli ecosystem is diversifying, but in different directions than the US.

The time-to-seed expectations are converging across markets. Israeli VCs now overwhelmingly expect companies to raise a seed within 6–12 months (51%, up from 22% in 2024). In the US, the compression is similar, AI-enabled development means products ship faster, milestones arrive sooner, and investors expect the pace to match.

One area where the markets diverge: round dynamics. In Israel, 64% of angels now only join existing rounds rather than leading, and a growing share of pre-seed rounds are led by a single VC acting alone (35% of rounds, up from 22%). The co-lead model is fading. In the US, the pre-seed ecosystem is broader, with more institutional participants per round — but the concentration dynamic is similar: as one US seed fund manager put it, you’re either a fast-growing AI team that will raise big from a top firm, or you’re everybody else.

What Investors Want to See (and What’s Changed)

Several shifts in investor expectations stood out in the Fusion data, and they’re worth internalizing if you’re a founder planning a raise.

Full-time commitment is table stakes. About 65% of VCs and 80% of angels expect all founders to be working full-time before they’ll invest. The model of starting a company on the side and then raising once you’re “ready” is largely dead in Israel. At Remagine, we feel the same way — if the founders aren’t all in, why should we be?

The bar for traction is rising. In the age of AI, building an MVP is no longer differentiated — everyone can ship fast. Investors are shifting their attention to GTM: 58% of VCs now expect at least proof-of-concept or pilot-level traction, and 33% expect paying customers, even at pre-seed. Among angels, over 60% expect initial sales. The product is necessary but no longer sufficient.

Solo founders still face headwinds. Despite the growing cultural narrative around solo founders — and high-profile examples like Base44’s $80M acquisition by Wix — the data tells a different story. Over 75% of VC funds made zero investments in solo founders in 2025. Angels are more open (48% made at least one solo-founder bet), but at the institutional level, team composition still matters enormously.

Fundraising is now the top challenge. For VCs, raising additional capital overtook market validation as the biggest challenge facing their portfolio companies (57% vs. 41%). For angels, market validation and US-based traction remain the primary concerns. The implication is clear: founders need to plan their runway carefully and treat the fundraising process as a continuous effort, not a discrete event.

What This Means for Founders Raising in Israel

If you’re building a company in Israel and thinking about a pre-seed round, the data points to several practical takeaways.

First, plan for a round of $1M–$1.5M at a $5M–$7M valuation cap on a post-money SAFE. That’s the market centre of gravity. If you’re a repeat founder in a hot space, you may command more, but don’t anchor to US benchmarks.

Second, get to market before you raise. The days of raising on a deck and an idea are mostly over. Show early signs of product-market pull: even a handful of pilot customers or design partners will materially improve your position.

Third, move fast. Investors expect you to reach seed-readiness in 6–12 months. Structure your round to give you at least 16 months of runway (12 months of execution plus 4 months of fundraising), and set milestones accordingly.

Fourth, understand that the Israeli pre-seed market is concentrating. Fewer investors are leading rounds, and those who do lead are increasingly doing so alone. Identify your target lead investor early and build the relationship before you’re actively raising.

And finally, recognize that the 30%–40% valuation discount to the US is a feature, not a bug, at least from the investor’s perspective, and arguably from the founder’s too. Lower valuations mean less pressure at seed, more room to grow into your valuation, and a larger margin of safety for everyone involved.

At Remagine Ventures, we were one of the most active pre-seed investors in Israel in 2025, and we plan to stay that way. If you’re building something interesting, even at the earliest stages, we’d love to hear from you. It’s never too early to start a conversation.

In an effort to educate myself, I went on a research mission to understand what are the various alternatives out there for AI Agents, the trade-offs, and the risks that should shape how you build and where you invest.

What Are AI Agents, Really?

For the past two years, the AI narrative centered on chatbots: systems that respond to prompts. Agents are fundamentally different. An AI agent is software that can observe its environment, make decisions, and take autonomous action to accomplish goals. It does not just suggest code edits; it opens your IDE, writes the code, runs the tests, and commits the changes. It does not just draft an email; it logs into your inbox and sends it.

The shift from “chat” to “act” is what makes 2026 feel like a genuine inflection point. When an AI can browse the web, read your files, execute shell commands, send messages, and manage your calendar, all in a continuous loop with persistent memory, you are no longer looking at a tool. You are looking at a digital worker. OpenClaw pitches itself as “the AI that actually does things.” Anthropic describes Cowork as outcome-driven software that works across desktop files and apps. Tencent explicitly describes its new products as moving AI from passive chatbots to active agents. The framing is converging across every major lab.

And the market knows it: OpenClaw surpassed 135,000 GitHub stars faster than any repository in history, it is currently at over 312,000 stars, ranking 9th overall, Manus AI was acquired by Meta for $2 billion, and every major AI lab scrambled to ship a competitor within weeks.

A survey of almost 3,000 employees and executives in global enterprises, conducted by Workday in June 2025, showed general acceptance of AI agents as co-pilots.

For founders, the question is where to build. For investors, the question is where the value accrues. Is it the open-source runtime layer, the model provider, the enterprise wrapper, the vertical application, or the trust and governance layer underneath? Let’s walk through the main contenders.

1. OpenClaw

The open-source agent that went viral and kicked off the entire category.

Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger (originally as “Clawdbot,” later renamed Moltbot, and finally OpenClaw in January 2026), this is the project that started the fire. OpenClaw runs locally, connects LLMs to over 100 built-in “skills” covering file management, browser control, email, and APIs, and maintains persistent memory across sessions. It supports chat surfaces including WhatsApp, Telegram, and Slack, plus an isolated browser profile. In February 2026, Steinberger announced he would join OpenAI, and the project moved to an open-source foundation.

By March 2026, OpenClaw had over 135,000 GitHub stars and was being used by millions globally, with China actually surpassing the US in adoption. Its own security docs are unusually candid: these systems can execute shell commands, read and write files, send messages as you, and be manipulated through prompt injection if you are not careful.

Pros:

• Free, open-source (MIT license), zero cost to start
• Runs locally, giving users full data control
• Massive community and ecosystem of skills
• Model-agnostic: works with GPT, Claude, Gemini, local models
• The de facto standard others are building on top of

Cons:

• Serious security vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-25253, CVSS 8.8)
• 12% of skills on ClawHub found to be malicious
• 135,000+ instances exposed to the public internet via default config
• No enterprise governance, audit trails, or compliance controls
• Requires technical skill to set up and secure properly

2. Manus AI

The finished product you use, not the framework you build with. Works while you sleep.

If OpenClaw is the open-source framework, Manus (by Butterfly Effect, the team behind Monica.im) is the polished product on the other end of the spectrum. Launched in March 2025, Manus gained notoriety for completing complex, multi-hour tasks: building full-stack apps, conducting deep market research, compiling multi-source reports, all asynchronously in a sandboxed cloud environment. You give it a goal, close your laptop, and it pings you when the job is done. It orchestrates multiple specialized sub-agents under the hood, calling different models (Claude, Qwen, and others) depending on the step.

In March 2026, Meta acquired Manus for $2 billion, a signal of just how seriously the big platforms are taking the agent category. Pricing runs from a free tier (1,000 starter credits) through a $39/month Starter plan up to $199/month Pro.

Pros:

• True async execution: runs in the cloud while you do other things
• Multi-modal: browses, codes, analyzes data, manages files
• Zero setup: no GitHub repos, no Docker, no API keys
• Free tier available for testing; credit-based pricing scales smoothly
• Meta acquisition signals massive backing and resources

Cons:

• Proprietary black box: you cannot inspect its reasoning or code easily
• Pro tier at $199/month is expensive for individual users
• All data runs through their servers, not ideal for sensitive corporate work
• Credit-based pricing makes costs hard to predict on complex tasks
• Post-acquisition direction under Meta is uncertain

3. NemoClaw (NVIDIA)

Not trying to out-hype OpenClaw. Trying to civilize it.

Announced at GTC 2026 on March 16, NemoClaw is the most interesting response to OpenClaw because it is not a replacement. It is a hardened reference stack that sits on top of OpenClaw and adds what enterprises need: security controls, policy enforcement, and NVIDIA’s own Nemotron AI models. The centerpiece is OpenShell, a sandboxed runtime where companies define exactly what an agent can do, what it cannot touch, and what requires human sign-off. It is a cleaner answer to the question every CIO eventually asks: “how do I stop this thing from going rogue?” Install is a single command, and it runs on any hardware, not just NVIDIA GPUs.

Pros:

• Enterprise-grade security and policy controls out of the box
• OpenShell sandboxing gives CISOs real governance levers
• Hardware-agnostic despite being an NVIDIA product
• Pairs with Nemotron models for on-prem, air-gapped deployments
• One-command install lowers the barrier for IT teams

Cons:

• Brand new (March 2026), production track record is nil
• Still built on OpenClaw, inheriting some of its attack surface
• NVIDIA’s core business is hardware; long-term software commitment unclear
• Pricing and licensing for enterprise use not yet fully transparent

4. Claude Cowork / Dispatch (Anthropic)

Anthropic’s managed, desktop-first agent for knowledge work. The “safe” alternative.

Philosophically, Claude Cowork sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from OpenClaw. It is not about self-hosting or hacking together your own agent stack. Cowork is a managed, desktop-first agent that moves through local files, folders, and everyday applications to finish tasks.

Dispatch, launched March 17, 2026, extends this by letting you send instructions from your phone and have Claude execute them on your desktop. The key differentiator is Anthropic’s focus on safety: built-in guardrails, content filtering, and a managed infrastructure model where Anthropic controls the security perimeter. It is probably the cleanest option for researchers, finance teams, legal teams, and operators who want outcomes, not infrastructure.

Pros:

• Strong built-in security and safety guardrails
• Managed infrastructure, no self-hosting headaches
• Phone-to-desktop control (Dispatch) is a compelling UX innovation
• Backed by Anthropic’s safety-first research reputation
• Integrated with Claude’s strong reasoning capabilities

Cons:

• Requires a paid subscription (Claude Pro at $20/mo minimum)
• Not open-source, vendor lock-in to Anthropic’s ecosystem
• Data routes through Anthropic’s servers, a trade-off for privacy-conscious users
• Smaller skill/plugin ecosystem compared to OpenClaw’s community
• Still in research preview

5. Devin (Cognition)

The specialist: an autonomous software engineer, not a general-purpose assistant.

While the other agents on this list try to do everything, Devin does one thing and bets its entire product on doing it better than anyone else: writing, debugging, and deploying software. Created by Cognition, Devin plans features, builds entire repositories, reads unfamiliar documentation to learn new libraries, and deploys working code. Devin 2.0 slashed pricing from $500/month to a $20/month Core plan (with Agent Compute Units at $2.25 each), making it accessible to solo developers. The Team plan ($500/month) adds API access and collaboration features.

For founders, Devin matters because it demonstrates the power of vertical agents: narrow scope, deep capability, clear ROI. If you are building an agent startup, the “Devin model” of picking one workflow and owning it completely is arguably more defensible than trying to be the next general-purpose assistant.

Pros:

• End-to-end coding: plans, builds, debugs, and deploys
• Strong technical reasoning; can learn unfamiliar libraries on its own
• Dramatically lower price point with 2.0 ($20/mo entry)
• Clear vertical focus makes the value proposition easy to measure

Cons:

• Not a general-purpose agent: cannot do research, email, or scheduling
• Compute-unit pricing makes costs unpredictable on large tasks
• Core plan’s 9 ACUs only buys roughly 2 hours of active work
• Enterprise plan requires custom pricing with no public transparency

6. Base44 Superagents

No-code agent builder: describe what you want, get an always-on autonomous worker.

Launched March 11, 2026, Base44 Superagents take a fundamentally different approach. Instead of a single general-purpose agent, users describe tasks in natural language and Base44 creates purpose-built agents that run 24/7 in the background. These agents connect to tools like Slack, Google Calendar, GitHub, WhatsApp, and Telegram, and maintain persistent memory across interactions. The emphasis is on accessibility: no code, no infrastructure, no API keys required. The trade-off is clear: the easier something is to stand up in a managed layer, the less raw control you have over the underlying stack. That is fine for many workflows, but it matters for sensitive enterprise use cases.

Pros:

• Truly no-code, accessible to non-technical users
• Always-on background execution with triggers and schedules
• Pre-built integrations with popular workplace tools
• Sandboxed environments with clear permission controls
• Persistent memory makes agents more effective over time

Cons:

• Less customizable than code-first alternatives
• Closed platform, dependent on Base44’s infrastructure and roadmap
• Newer entrant with less proven track record at scale
• Integration depth may lag behind OpenClaw’s 100+ skills

7. Perplexity Comet

An AI browser that does not just search. It acts.

Perplexity’s Comet is an AI-native browser that turns Perplexity from an “answer engine” into an “action engine.” Launched on iPhone in March 2026, Comet embeds an AI assistant directly alongside web content: it can summarize pages, pull out specific details, and execute web-based workflows (e.g., “find the five best laptops, add them to a spreadsheet, and draft a comparison email”). For Pro users it runs on Claude Sonnet 4.6, for Max users on Opus 4.6. Perplexity also offers a “Personal Computer” product: an always-on M4 Mac mini that runs autonomously with persistent access to your apps and services.

However, Comet has already attracted legal trouble: Amazon won a court order in March 2026 blocking Comet from accessing password-protected sections of Amazon, accusing Perplexity of computer fraud for failing to disclose when the agent is shopping on a real person’s behalf. That lawsuit is a preview of the legal battles every browser-based agent will face.

Pros:

• World-class search combined with the ability to act on results
• Highly optimized for quick, web-based research and task loops
• Personal Computer product offers always-on, persistent execution
• Built-in audit trails and approval workflows

Cons:

• Already facing legal action (Amazon injunction) over agent behavior
• Personal Computer is expensive: $200/month plus Mac mini hardware
• Limited autonomy outside of web-based tasks
• Personal Computer is Mac-only and waitlist-only at launch

8. Accio Work (Alibaba)

Alibaba’s enterprise agent army for global SMBs, from sourcing to compliance.

Unveiled today (on March 23, 2026), Accio Work evolved from Alibaba’s B2B sourcing engine (launched November 2024, now serving 10M+ monthly active users) into a full enterprise agent platform. Rather than a single agent, it deploys specialized “squads” covering analysts, creators, and logistics experts that work in parallel. It handles automated compliance across 100+ markets, autonomous supplier negotiations, marketing automation, and logistics management through WhatsApp and Telegram. Reuters describes it as a plug-and-play, no-code AI taskforce for SMBs with strict permission protocols around sensitive data and financial actions.

Alibaba also has Wukong, an enterprise orchestration layer that coordinates multiple agents for documents, spreadsheets, meeting transcription, and research. It is closer to a real enterprise agent platform than a flashy consumer assistant, but remains in invitation-only beta.

Pros:

• Purpose-built for e-commerce and global trade workflows
• Multi-agent orchestration with specialized agents working in parallel
• Already backed by 10M+ users from the Accio sourcing platform
• Strict permission protocols for financial and sensitive actions

Cons:

• Tightly coupled to Alibaba’s ecosystem, limited outside e-commerce
• Data sovereignty concerns for Western enterprises using a Chinese platform
• Not open-source; black box decision-making
• Not yet publicly available (expected end of March 2026)

9. The Chinese Agent Boom

A Cambrian explosion from every major Chinese tech giant, moving at staggering speed.

China has surpassed the US in OpenClaw adoption, and every major tech company has shipped its own variant:

Tencent launched ClawBot (integrating OpenClaw directly into WeChat), plus WorkBuddy (“deployment-free OpenClaw”), QClaw, Lighthouse, and an AI Agent Security Sandbox. If the future of agents is chat-native, Tencent is extremely well positioned: over a billion WeChat users can invoke agents directly from chat. ByteDance shipped ArkClaw through its Volcano Engine cloud platform. Minimax launched MaxClaw. MoonShot shipped Kimi Claw, whose massive context window lets agents read 50+ research papers at once to synthesise reports. Zhipu AI released AutoGLM, a direct competitor focused on smartphone automation: it literally taps through apps on your phone. Baidu is pushing agents across desktop, cloud, mobile, and smart-home devices, though the public picture is still fuzzier (the clearest reporting is via Reuters rather than an official product page).

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has moved to restrict state agencies and SOEs from using OpenClaw on office computers, citing security concerns. A mirror image of US concerns about Chinese AI platforms.

Pros:

• Massive user bases (WeChat alone has 1B+ users)
• Deep integration with dominant local platforms and ecosystems
• Aggressive development pace and competitive dynamics
• Purpose-built for Chinese market workflows and compliance

Cons:

• Fragmented ecosystem: too many forks, unclear which will survive
• Government restrictions create regulatory uncertainty
• Data sovereignty and censorship concerns for international users
• Most are wrappers around OpenClaw, not independent platforms

The Risks: What Should Keep Founders and Investors Up at Night

The agent category is exciting, but the risk profile is unlike anything we have seen in previous software cycles.

Here is what founders building in this space and investors funding them need to internalize:

1. Security Is Not a Feature. It Is an Existential Threat.

OpenClaw’s track record is a warning to the entire category. A critical vulnerability (CVE-2026-25253, CVSS 8.8) allowed attackers to steal authentication tokens simply by tricking a user into visiting a malicious website. Researchers found that 12% of all skills on ClawHub (341 out of 2,857) were malicious, complete with professional documentation and innocuous names. Over 135,000 OpenClaw instances were found exposed to the public internet because the default configuration binds to all network interfaces. This is what happens when a developer tool goes mainstream before the security infrastructure catches up.

2. The “Lethal Trifecta” of Agent Risk

Palo Alto Networks identified three properties that make agents uniquely dangerous when combined: access to private data (files, emails, credentials), exposure to untrusted content (web pages, messages from others), and the ability to perform external communications (send emails, post messages, make API calls). Any two of these three would be manageable. All three together create a system where a single prompt injection can lead to data exfiltration, unauthorised actions, or lateral movement through connected services. Every agent platform on this list exhibits this trifecta to some degree.

3. Supply Chain Attacks at Scale

The skill/plugin marketplaces that make agents powerful also create a new software supply chain attack vector. When users install third-party skills that have access to their email, file system, and API keys, they are extending trust to unknown developers in a context where the blast radius is enormous. We have already seen this play out with ClawHub. Enterprise skill curation and signing will become a critical infrastructure need, and a startup opportunity.

4. The Recursive Spend Problem

Because agents self-correct and retry when they fail, they can accidentally burn through thousands of dollars in API credits in minutes if they get stuck in a loop. This is not hypothetical. Reports from 2026 include: four agents in a research pipeline entering an infinite conversation loop for 11 days, racking up $47,000 in charges; a data enrichment agent misinterpreting an API error and running 2.3 million calls over a weekend. Across the Fortune 500, unbudgeted agent compute spend is estimated at $400 million and climbing. For founders building agents, cost controls (token budgets, step limits, time caps, and automatic kill switches) are not optional. For investors, ask every agent startup what happens when their system gets stuck.

5. Shadow Agency

Just as enterprises dealt with “Shadow IT” in the 2010s (employees spinning up unauthorised SaaS tools), they now face Shadow Agency: employees deploying autonomous agents like OpenClaw on local machines that bypass corporate firewalls, data governance policies, and compliance controls. The difference is that shadow SaaS was mostly passive data storage. Shadow agents actively execute: they send emails, call APIs, move files, and make decisions with delegated authority. The blast radius of an unauthorised agent is dramatically larger than an unauthorised Dropbox folder.

6. Liability and Compliance Vacuum

When an agent autonomously sends an email, negotiates a supplier contract, or files a tax document on behalf of a business, who is liable if it gets it wrong? Current legal frameworks do not have clear answers. Amazon’s injunction against Perplexity’s Comet is an early signal. Enterprises adopting agents for regulated workflows (financial services, healthcare, government) face a genuine compliance gap. This is both a risk and an opportunity: the companies that solve agent governance will capture significant enterprise value.

7. Geopolitical Fragmentation

China banning OpenClaw from government use while Chinese companies ship a dozen clones, the US scrutinizing data flows through Chinese agent platforms, the EU likely to regulate agent autonomy under the AI Act. The agent ecosystem is fracturing along geopolitical lines faster than previous technology waves. Cross-border agent startups will need to navigate this from day one.

8. Human Oversight Still Matters

Anthropic’s own internal research found that employees report they can fully delegate only about 0-20% of their work to Claude, even while using it in roughly 60% of their tasks. Most high-stakes work still requires active supervision and validation. That feels like the right mental model for the whole category: agents are already useful, but they are not yet trustworthy enough to be unsupervised co-workers in every workflow. For founders, that means building for human-in-the-loop, not human-out-of-the-loop. For investors, be skeptical of any pitch that assumes full autonomy is around the corner.

The biggest gold rush since… the last gold rush

Where does the value accrue?

• The agent runtime layer (OpenClaw and its variants) is commoditizing in real time. It is open-source, it is being forked by every major cloud provider, and it will be table stakes within a year. The model layer is a fierce but separate battle. The durable value likely sits in four places:
• Enterprise security and governance: NemoClaw’s approach, but as an independent startup play. Identity, permissions, audit trails, memory boundaries, safe tool use, policy, sandboxing, observability.
• Vertical agent applications: The Devin model. Pick one workflow, own it completely, build proprietary data advantages. Scoped enough to earn real trust, narrow enough to deliver measurable ROI.
• Trust infrastructure: Skill marketplaces with signing and curation, compliance layers for regulated industries, cost-control middleware that prevents runaway spend.
• Agent-native distribution: Tencent embedding agents inside WeChat, Perplexity building an agent-native browser. Whoever controls the surface where users invoke agents captures an enormous amount of value.

The winners in this wave may not be the loudest “superagents.” They may be the companies that solve the missing control layer around them. The excitement is real, but the moat may end up sitting one layer below the agent itself.

The more useful question for founders and investors is not “which agent is hottest?” It is: which products are actually safe enough, scoped enough, and opinionated enough to earn real workflows? That is where the market will get sorted.