Jeff Clavier
Managing Partner at Uncork Capital
Menlo Park, California
Overview
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 platformwhich includes a robust distribution network, flexible hardware solutions and innovative software applicationsenables 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.