Founder of Uncork Capital, one of the OG seed VC firms. Invested in 290 cos at scary early stage. @bernadette hubby, dad of 2, wino, skier. Expect no bullshit.

Joined March 2007
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1 May 2025
I’m thrilled to share that we have just closed two new funds: the $225M seed-focused Uncork VIII and the $75M opportunity fund, Uncork Plus IV. And today, we’re also celebrating @uncorkcap 21st anniversary. It’s been a long—at times tumultuous—but always incredible journey to reach the firm’s “adulthood” and I couldn’t be prouder of the team we’ve built and the portfolio of founders we’ve had the privilege of backing over the years. After co-managing Uncork with @bandrew in recent years, I’ve asked him to take on the role of sole Managing Partner as we prepared to raise these new funds. I’ve had an absolute blast leading Uncork for 21 years—helping shape the seed industry alongside my fellow “OG’s”—but the time feels right for me to step back from day-to-day management. I’ll continue working closely with our portfolio founders, sourcing new opportunities with my Partners, and investing in the next generation of frontier and deep tech entrepreneurs. I’ll also be carving out space for some long-overdue bucket list travel, quality family time, and launching a small wine project in Walla Walla, WA. Please join me in congratulating Andy as he leads Uncork into its next phase. We couldn’t ask for a better steward of the firm’s future. LFG!
Today marks Uncork Capital's 21st 🎂 That would usually be reason enough to celebrate but I'm also delighted to announce that we've raised $300M in new funds to back the founders building the next generation of category-defining companies 🚀 medium.com/uncorkcapital/unc…
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
When we invested in Mirai Labs (@trymirai) earlier this year, they had a long-ish term plan to offer full-stack on-device inference infrastructure and the underlying models. I thought it would take them a year... In less than four months, their co-designed quant inference stack for Apple Silicon shows 40–60% more tokens/sec vs llama.cpp and MLX at the same quality level. This week they published technical posts on quantization (trymirai.com/blog/quantizati…) and sparse buffers (trymirai.com/blog/sparse-buf…) which I encourage app builders and inference consumers to read. Awesome stuff from @Darkolorin, @dmitrshvets, and the Mirai team.
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The Clay Jar and the Data Center: an essay on the orchestration layer between energy and AI compute, and what will determine the $/token economics in the inference era. mariohsouto.github.io/essays…
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Careful, some dude is going around texting friends pretending to be me. Ignore and report as spam 🙏.
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Since launching in 2015, @LaunchDarkly has been synonymous with enterprise-grade feature management (50 trillion feature evals per day, serving many of the most exciting companies in the world). Today they're announcing AgentControl, the first product as they become the runtime control platform teams trust to move quickly with AI. While staying in control of code (and agents) in production, of course. Very excited for LD's next chapter! 🚀
I started LaunchDarkly because teams deserved better control over what they shipped. With AI, that matters more than ever. Today we’re launching AgentControl: real-time visibility and control for AI agents in production. ld.team/6W88xI
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
Delighted to welcome James, Andreas and the Unkey team to the Uncork portfolio! APIs remain the backbone of the modern internet but until now the tooling to build and deploy them remained entrenched in the stone age. No more - Unkey is the way that every ambitious technology company will serve APIs, tokens, and whatever comes next 🚀
Unkey raised $4.5M led by @uncorkcap. Deploy production APIs on real servers. No serverless. No cold starts. Instant rollbacks. Ship APIs, not infrastructure. ↓ unkey.com/blog/unkey-raises-…
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
Apr 22
Replying to @amperoshealth
@amperoshealth raises a $16M Series A led by Bessemer. Excited to see the team hit this milestone! I sat down with @mmiernowski to talk about his journey, customer relationships, and knowing when it was time to raise the A. Watch/listen: youtube.com/watch?v=o7sCo851…
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We launched Uncork's new brand yesterday and two of the core tenets are investing before it's obvious and sticking around for the long-term. I like to think we do that with every portfolio company but Coder's journey exemplifies that even more than most. We are the only VC to have invested in every single round - long before it was obvious, through the messy middle, and after it began to inflect. This is what we do and I couldn't be prouder to be an ongoing part of their eight year overnight success story. Onwards! 🚀
We're excited to announce a $90M Series C led by @KKR_Co with participation from QRT, @uncorkcap and other existing investors! Learn more: cdr.co/coder-series-c
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
Venture firms rebrand for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it's genuine evolution - the identity finally catches up with who the firm has become. Sometimes it's camouflage - a way of looking like a different kind of firm than the one the last few years revealed. And sometimes it's just that the old website was embarrassing and someone finally had enough. Ours is mostly the first, none of the second, and just a touch of the last :) Today we're launching a new brand and a redesigned website. The logo is refreshed. The palette is cleaner. The typography is sharper. And the site actually reflects how we think in 2026. Read more: uncorkcapital.com/blog/a-new…
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For years, the AI industry has been obsessed with extraction. Turning documents into data. And it worked - extraction got really good! But extraction was never the hard part... The hard part is everything that comes after. The business logic. The exception handling. The human review loops. The schema enforcement. The production API. The monitoring. The drift detection. That's where every AI project stalls. That changes today with Bem's new Forge product 👀
Feb 24
AI got great at reading documents. But reading was never the hard part. The hard part: turning extracted data into a running operation. Today we shipped Forge. It closes that gap. Describe your operation. Drop your data. Deploy. 🧵
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
We're still on the lookout for VC mentors to support the aspiring VCs in Cohort 21 of #VCUniversity. VC mentors will connect with their mentee for 1 hour/month from April - June 2026. US-based VCs of all experience levels and sectors are still needed, but we particularly need more #lifescience VCs to volunteer! Learn more and sign up by THIS Friday, 2/27👉 docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F…
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
Delighted to announce @uncorkcap's investment in Mirai (@trymirai), the platform to make on-device inference seamless, fast and multi-platform (Apple silicon today, Android soon). Mirai’s co-founders, @Darkolorin and @dmitrshvets, independently built Reface and Prisma: early on-device AI products used monthly by hundreds of millions of people globally 🚀 Read more about why we're excited - link in comments!
We raised $10M led by @uncorkcap to make on-device AI inference accessible to developers building on Apple Silicon. We're using the funds to expand model coverage across text, voice, and vision, working directly with model makers to bring their models on-device where latency, cost, and privacy favor local execution over cloud. Our proprietary inference engine is up to 37% faster than Apple's MLX with up to 59% faster prefill. Developers integrate it in a few lines of code without needing specialized systems expertise. The runtime supports hybrid deployments, routing inference between device and cloud seamlessly. Models running on-device are becoming a new capability layer where developers can build system-level experiences independently. We're building the infrastructure that enables that future. The round includes participation from an incredible group of angels including @dps @FrancoisChauba1 @marcinzukowski @matiii @gokulr @scooterbraun @krishnanvijay @benparr @MattPRD @adityajami and others. More on it at our blog trymirai.com/blog/mirai-rais…
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Announcement: Applications are open for VC Emerging Manager Office Hours 15. A highly selective, virtual program for Funds II–IV managers. Just 25 managers per cohort. Curated GP and LP conversations. No pitching. No demos. Built to make a few hours truly count. Apply by Feb 20. ventureforward.org/vf-events…
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
I'm excited to announce @uncorkcap's investment in @DuckbillHQ, leading their $7.75M seed round. Over the last decade, Duckbill has become the go-to consultancy for the "nine figure club", i.e. the world's largest spenders on cloud infrastructure (including names like Delta Airlines, Ticketmaster, Epic Games, NewRelic, Washington Post). Co-founders @mikejulian and @QuinnyPig are now productizing their encyclopedic knowledge and strongly-held views into a platform for every business consumer of cloud infra (AWS, Azure, GCP), SaaS (Datadog, Snowflake), and AI tokens (Anthropic, OpenAI). Their contrarian pitch: the cloud cost management sector, commonly known in the industry as FinOps, is fixated on making bills smaller, when the real problem is that nobody can predict what the costs will be next month. Unsurprisingly (not), CFOs love predictability. For any seed investment I ask the following questions: is the market large, is the market growing, and do the founders have an unfair advantage. The answer for all of these is a resounding yes (Corey's legendary podcast, "This Week in AWS", provides reach and authority that any CMO will kill for.) Welcome Mike and Corey to the portfolio, and a big yay for another Uncork and @heavybit co-investment! 🚀 geekwire.com/2026/cloud-and-…
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
For too long, GTM has been divided into specialists, creating a soul-crushing web of dependencies. But, speed is everything and dependencies are the enemy of growth. Enough is enough. Mutiny is killing all dependencies, once and for all. Now everyone can become a GTM athlete, creating highest quality (and on-brand) content.
The era of the specialist is over. Full-stack GTM athletes are taking over. For too long, GTM has been divided into specialists, creating a soul-crushing web of dependencies: - Sales needs a custom business case to close a deal, but Marketing is slammed. - Marketing has a winning campaign idea, but design and engineering can’t prioritize it. - CRO has 5 ideas for increasing sales productivity, but no GTM engineers to execute. In GTM, speed is everything and dependencies are the enemy. That's why we're giving GTM teams the full-stack capabilities they need to close revenue. Welcome to the era of the GTM Athlete. These are people who don't ask permission or wait in queues. They can do whatever is needed to take deals from cold to closed—research accounts, launch ads, create a business case, generate tailored follow-ups, and close deals. Sales rep brainstorms with their champion how to convince the CISO. 30 mins later sends them a polished business case with security architecture and ROI. By lunch time, she launches ads to the entire buying committee. The next day, the rep presents a custom deck to key decision makers and gets verbal commitment. No more begging. No more waiting. No more losing. Our vision is to build the AI Swiss Army knife that turns specialists into GTM athletes. Today we are launching a critical capability that enables this vision: an AI agent that can create anything customer facing. You can now create executive business cases, deal follow-ups, landing pages, ABM campaigns and more, all by yourself. Unlike other AI tools, our agent plugs into your brand and data to create materials that actually look and sound like you. Sign up on our website. We're letting people off the waitlist every day, with 30 days of unlimited AI usage. I’d love to hear your feedback.
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
Part 4 of interviewing early employees at rocketship companies 🚀 Had the joy of interviewing my friend Olivia Kusio, the 1st & founding product designer @GPTZeroAI — one of the breakout AI companies of the last two years (and an @uncorkcap portco!)
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Feb 5
When I first led @Gamma's seed round in 2021, ChatGPT didn't exist. Waymo wasn't yet publicly available. Humans wrote the vast majority of code. Fast forward to late 2025 when I invested a second time with @uncorkcap, the world had transformed, and Gamma's progress massively accelerated ($0 ➡️ $100M!), but so many things remained the same.
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
We’re excited to announce that Loft has been selected by @CNES the Direction générale de l'armement to lead the execution of the #DESIR program to provide France with its first space-based #SAR imaging capability. A long-standing technological partner of the DGA, Loft will be leading a consortium that includes @Thales_Alenia_S and @TEKEVER France to build out sovereign space capabilities structured around Loft’s proven space infrastructure as a service model. The project represents Loft’s continued expansion in Europe, helping to preserve and develop critical space expertise to efficiently meet the requirements of a rapidly changing world. This program targets initial operational service by early 2029, with an in-orbit operational phase of at least two years. Dive deeper: lnkd.in/gprCm9Wp #spacemadesimple #DESIR
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Jeff Clavier retweeted
Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations I don't think people realize how bad the slop is right now It's not just that researchers from @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @MIT, @Cambridge_Uni are using AI - they allowed LLMs to generate hallucinations in their papers and didn't notice at all. It's insane that these made it through peer review👇
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