Jeff Clavier

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.

[Jeff Clavier @jeff]

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!

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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 🚀 https://t.co/mqWN5UPizs

[Jeff Clavier @jeff]

Super excited to welcome @ilancedillos as our first Head of Comms!

[Ilan Cedillos @ilancedillos]

Very happy to share that I've joined @uncorkcap as their new Head of Communications!

I'll be working directly with our founders on how they tell their story to the world and also building the Uncork brand.

Grateful to @Bandrew @amy @jeff and the whole Uncork team. LFG!

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

At seed, the best technology doesn't always win, but the clearest story almost always does. That’s why we’ve decided to give storytelling the same dedicated investment that we’ve put behind talent and go-to-market.

Very happy to welcome @ilancedillos to the Uncork team as our first-ever Head of Communications. Read more how on why storytelling is now a core part of how we support our founders ��� https://t.co/UaIXBBTwKj

[Jeff Clavier @jeff]

A great piece from Forbes on Walla Walla Syrah https://t.co/9bvew5UhG0

I’d take it one step further: the same is true across virtually all of Walla Walla’s top varietals. Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Grenache, Viognier… the quality-to-price ratio here is simply extraordinary when compared to Napa or Sonoma.

It wasn’t the only reason @Bernadette and I decided to move to Walla Walla, but it was absolutely one of the factors. Being surrounded by world-class vineyards and winemakers, while still finding incredible wines at remarkably fair prices, made the decision even easier.

It’s also a big part of why we chose to start Clos Clavier here.

[Venture Forward @VCForward]

⏰ Just ONE MORE WEEK left to apply for Emerging Manager Office Hours 16, happening in partnership with @renvcf's UnDemo Day, held in Detroit, MI on Oct. 1!

This program offers an opportunity for underrepresented EMs to connect with LPs, GPs with significant fundraising and fund management experience, industry advisors, and each other, for open and collaborative conversations.

Apply now to participate! 👉 https://t.co/gXK4csBPOg

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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 (https://t.co/yelsndCuVA) and sparse buffers (https://t.co/GCtMcMzzQ5) which I encourage app builders and inference consumers to read.

Awesome stuff from @Darkolorin, @dmitrshvets, and the Mirai team.

[Mario Souto @mariohsouto]

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.
https://t.co/BwsuS41VRU

[Jeff Clavier @jeff]

Careful, some dude is going around texting friends pretending to be me. Ignore and report as spam 🙏.

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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! 🚀

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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 🚀

[Susan @susanwliu]

@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: https://t.co/BqEszP7huM

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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! 🚀

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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: https://t.co/79jRoq5Gvt

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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 👀

[Venture Forward @VCForward]

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👉 https://t.co/94IHHVLJHi

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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!

[Venture Forward @VCForward]

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. https://t.co/2zuzTt9jdV

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

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! 🚀

https://t.co/kjFEKg8rAp

[Jeff Clavier @jeff]

We at @uncorkcap couldn't be more excited to share this news about a recent investment of ours: Inertia led by my old friend @jeffiel.

https://t.co/DgUzgdgvhM