JC

Jeff Clavier

Managing Partner at Uncork Capital

Menlo Park, California

Overview 

Jeff Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner at Uncork Capital, a renowned seed firm in Silicon Valley. With a background in venture capital, he has invested in a range of successful companies like Pienso, Overflow, and Stensul, demonstrating a keen eye for promising startups and contributing to their growth and success.

Work Experience 

  • Founding Partner

    2025 - Current

  • Founder and Managing Partner

    2004 - 2025

    Investing in 12 pre-seed/seed-stage startups per year, with an average check size of $2.5M targeting an initial ownership position between 12% and 15%. Our core sectors are AI-first mobile/cloud saas, developer tools, consumer services, marketplaces and frontier/deeptech. Never hesitate to reach out, as it's hard to second guess where our next investment is going to land!

Uncork Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm that focuses on SaaS, consumer, marketplaces, hardware, and new technology startups.

  • Advisory Board Member

    2005

ALPHA is a private network for tech leaders, focusing on mobile crypto mining.

  • Board Member

    2015 - 2019

National Venture Capital Association advocates for policies that promote long-term investment and encourage innovation.

  • Partner

    2000 - 2004

    Managed all RVC operations in the US, including portfolio management, sourcing deal flow, investing, relationships and business development. RVC, which is the spin out of the corporate venture arm of Reuters, was set up in 1994 and began investing the Greenhouse Fund in Palo Alto, California in 1995. In 1997, RVC expanded the focus of its operations to Europe, bringing its significant Silicon Valley experience to a market with relatively few venture capitalists focused on early stage information technology companies. Since inception, RVC I has invested $560 million in 82 companies, including Yahoo!, Verisign, Phone.com (now Openwave Systems), Digimarc, Infoseek, Orchestream, and Metamerge, amongst others. With 16 IPOs and 27 trade sales or other cash realisations, and a first fund that is 94% returned, RVC has one of the strongest track records in European venture capital.

  • Co-Producer

    2000 - 2004

    For 3 years, RVC has produced a technology conference, RVC SoftEdge. SoftEdge gathers the different components of the software innovation ecosystem, including entrepreneurs, thought leaders, leading technology columnists, CIOs, senior executives of established technology players and VCs. Its stated goal is also to provide a bridge between US and Europe/Israel software entrepreneurs. The last edition was successfully co-produced with Pulver.com (http://www.pulver.com/rvc2003).

  • Board Observer

    2003 - 2004

    Pathfire is the leading provider of digital media distribution and management solutions to the television, media and entertainment industries. We serve major broadcast networks, station groups, cable companies, syndicators, advertising agencies, stock footage houses and other leading media companies/content providers. The Pathfire platform—which includes a robust distribution network, flexible hardware solutions and innovative software applications—enables our customers to maximize efficiency, driving new revenue opportunities while reducing costs.

  • Board Observer

    2001 - 2004

    Tacit is the leading provider of Enterprise Collaboration Management solutions. Tacit's award-winning technology connects existing collaboration and communication systems and synchronizes collaboration activity across the enterprise. With Tacit, organizations can proactively guide and stimulate collaboration to meet business objectives by dynamically bringing the right people together at the right time, to interact in the right collaboration environment. The result is new levels of productivity, efficiency, and innovation for the entire organization.

  • Board Member

    2000 - 2004

    UltraDNS™ Corporation, the leading provider of Managed DNS Services, creates and powers technology solutions that enhance the reliability, scalability and performance of the world's largest and most highly available networks, including that of Microsoft, Oracle and the .org Top Level Domain root infrastructure. UltraDNS' technology and services have found wide adoption in the Fortune 1000 and enterprise customer segments. To date, UltraDNS has acquired over 7,500 customers and currently manages 5 million domains, which represents approximately 11% share of the global domain market.

  • Head of Development, Systems

    1993 - 2000

    After the acquisition of Effix by Reuters, I ran the the product development activities of a number of activities for the Group, including Risk Management, Desktop and Server products, Order Management,... Those groups were based in Paris, New-York, London and totalled over 250 people in 2000. Responsibilities covered development, support, documentation, development process, architecture, and liaison with sales, marketing, global accounts,...

  • Head of Development

    1989 - 1993

    Joined as a developer this nascent french startup, which very innovative applications for traders on Sun Worstations. Then took on responsibility for projects, products and development teams.

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