Uncork Capital

Uncork is a seed-stage venture firm investing in founder potential long before it’s obvious. We invest in companies that push industries forward.

[Amy Saper @amy]

At the @uncorkcap portfolio summit, @PeterJ_Walker shared this visualization showing @OpenRouter's top AI models over time, ranked by spending and token usage.

Fascinating how quickly the leaderboard changes & how frequently open models break into the top five.

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

Last week we brought Uncork’s investors and founders together in SF for our AGM and Portfolio Summit. Mayor @DanielLurie joined us too! My kids finally think Dad’s job is interesting 🙃

Huge thanks to our investors, founders, speakers, and the Uncork team who made it happen.

[Uncork Capital @uncorkcap]

@getskydive Come be our neighbor 👇 https://t.co/4RY77wogWJ

[Uncork Capital @uncorkcap]

We’ve put @getskydive’s AI coworkers to work across Uncork, from company research and event planning to portfolio partnerships. They’ve earned their desks, now they have an office to match!

Congrats to the Skydive team on the launch 🪂

[Skydive @getskydive]

Your AI coworkers now have an office.

@getskydive is open to everyone. Build a team of agents, watch them work in a 3D office, and hand them tasks over Slack, email, iMessage or the web.

Claim your company’s domain to put your office on the map. They work for free this week.

[Tripp Jones @thistrippjones]

I’ve known @kevinweil and @dpatil for nearly two decades. They’re two of the smartest people I know. So when they asked @uncorkcap to invest in their new company, we jumped at the opportunity.

Kevin and DJ, alongside Sol Reisberg and @manohar_paluri, are building something that could genuinely change millions of lives: a new approach to discovering medicines that brings together expert chemists, AI, and robotics.

Today, developing a new drug takes years and involves testing thousands of molecules, most of which don't work. And all those failed experiments contain valuable information that today's AI models largely don't have access to.

Warp is building the scientific infrastructure here in the U.S. to help researchers discover new medicines faster, with the goal of dramatically accelerating experimentation. The lab will also generate valuable experimental data to help train increasingly capable AI models.

This team could do just about anything, and they've decided to take on one of the hardest problems in science. Couldn't be more excited to be part of it!

[Kevin Weil 🇺🇸 @kevinweil]

💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.

We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.

I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.

[Tripp Jones @thistrippjones]

Incredibly excited to announce @uncorkcap's investment in Evos (@ai_evos), co-led alongside my good friend, @kerby at Field Ventures, as the company comes out of stealth with $9M in funding.

Logistics is one of the largest, most complex industries in the world. We've built incredible technology to track trucks and shipments, yet so much of what keeps the industry running still depends on the judgment of experienced people. And most of that knowledge lives in their heads.

@im_urav and the Evos team have built something really unique. Their autonomous AI operators learn how a business actually runs, then apply that judgment to handle operational work around the clock. Instead of telling businesses how to work, Evos learns how they work.

The early traction is extraordinary. Evos crossed $1M in ARR just four weeks after launch, and customers are already expanding how they use the platform.

I've spent years looking at logistics technology, and this is one of the first companies I've seen that could fundamentally change how these businesses operate. Urav is also just 23 years old and one of the most impressive young founders I've met. His speed and understanding of this industry are something else!

Also thrilled to be investing alongside @CrosslinkCap, @utopiacapitalco, and several angel investors.

https://t.co/LW1eoVAgmS

[Aadi Nashikkar @aadi_nash]

Proud to share that @phinity_ai is coming out of stealth today, announcing our seed fundraise and that we’ve reached 8-figures in annualized run rate.

Chip design has been stuck in the 20th century for far too long. Now, for the first time in decades, a unique set of emerging factors is making it possible to fundamentally reinvent how chips are designed.

At Phinity, we’re building toward fully autonomous chip design, with the goal of enabling custom silicon for thousands of emerging AI applications. Our team combines hardware experts, AI researchers, and infrastructure/EDA engineers to define a new way to design chips.

We’re extremely grateful to @uncorkcap for leading our $5.2M seed, to @MoxxieVentures and angels including @JeffDean for joining the round, and to @pearvc for leading our pre-seed and backing us from the start.

We’ve worked so, so hard to make this happen, and I’m proud to share our work publicly for the first time!

You can read more about the announcement below. https://t.co/tGemLbFjsA

We’re hiring for ops and engineering roles. If you want to help build the future of chip design with us or are interested in learning more/partnering, please reach out to me or @sonyashijin .

[Sonya Jin @sonyashijin]

Excited to finally share that @phinity_ai is now out of stealth! We're announcing our seed fundraise and that we’ve reached 8-figures in annualized run rate.

We’re already working with some of the largest foundation model labs. Our mission is to build fully autonomous chip design so AI can help us search beyond the limits of human engineering and discover computational systems we would never find on our own.

We’re fortunate to have the support of @uncorkcap, which led our $5.2M seed round, with participation from @Moxxie including @JeffDean, following our pre-seed led by @pearvc!

It’s been an amazing few months, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity to build the future of chip design with such a talented team.

You can read more about what we’re building and why in our full announcement. https://t.co/F27viag1a7

We’re hiring across all disciplines - if you’re interested in working with us, please reach out to me or @aadi_nash.

[Amy Saper @amy]

Thrilled to share that @uncorkcap led @phinity_ai’s $5.2M seed round!

Phinity is building AI systems to design, verify and eventually tape out chips. In seven years in venture, I’ve never seen a ramp like this: $0 to eight figures in annualized run rate in under three months.

I first met @sonyashijin and @aadi_nash late last year, when Phinity was only a few months old and had no customers or revenue.

Rather than simply layering coding agents onto existing workflows, Phinity is training AI models to design chips themselves.

Since then, they've assembled an incredible team from NVIDIA, Intel, and frontier research labs. Phinity's agents have outperformed experienced hardware engineers on power, performance and area, even when those engineers were using frontier coding agents, and the system produces verified designs an order of magnitude faster.

If you're at a frontier lab or semiconductor company and want to dramatically shorten your chip design process, the Phinity team would love to chat. And if you want to work on one of the hardest technical problems out there, they're hiring!

More on why we invested: https://t.co/NgpcSdpmnK

[Erica Wenger @Erica_Wenger]

Jeff Clavier’s biggest investment regret is @Uber .

@jeff was at the dinner where the idea was first discussed, but when UberCab eventually came across his desk, one concern about the team convinced him to pass.

Jeff on the investment he still regrets:

“My big problem and the reason why I passed was that Travis wasn't the CEO. At the end of the day, if you don't believe in the execution capability of the team, then you don't invest.”

“There was like $100K left in early September of 2010. And I'm like, ‘Okay, I'll take it."

“They said, ‘Oh, sorry, we decided to give it to someone else so thanks, but no thanks.’”

Jeff Clavier: How to Raise Your First Venture Fund via Trailblazers Podcast

[Jeff Clavier @jeff]

Thanks to my old friend @Jason for bringing me back on @twistartups. It was a fun episode arguing (a bit) with @jefielding and @davemcclure. Enjoy!

[Susan @susanwliu]

Big congrats to the @Numeral team on their Series C! Very proud to have backed them since the seed.

@SpamRoss and Matt are some of the most impressive founders I’ve ever met. They’ve gone after a huge, mission-critical market dominated by legacy incumbents and have become the dominant next-gen player in just a few years, with 3,500+ customers across 90+ countries.

Couldn’t be more excited to invest more in this round!

[Sam Ross @SpamRoss]

Numeral has raised a $100M Series C, led by Insight Partners with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Benchmark, Mayfield, Uncork, Y Combinator, FCVC, and Geodesic.

This brings our total funding to $157M.

@numeral solves U.S. sales tax, VAT, and GST compliance for 3,500+ global businesses, trusted by companies like Supabase, Eight Sleep, and Graza.

We’re building the future of tax -- where AI agents, human expertise, and global compliance come together in one system.

Since starting the business in 2023, we’ve grown quickly across our core e-commerce and software segments, while expanding into new industries including manufacturing, distribution, and wholesale.

There is a lot of work in front of us. Sales tax is more dynamic than ever, with states like California implementing new taxes on software and more states using AI for enforcement.

We are hiring across the org from engineering to product, sales, and marketing. And we’ve just opened our new office in NYC. If you are looking for what’s next, I’d love for you to take a peek at our careers page.

Excited for the year ahead. And humbled to be working with investors like @insightpartners, @rebeccaliudoyle, @SalesforceVC, @katiessschwartz, @ZKokosa, @MayfieldFund, @SPangulur, @benchmark, @chetanp, @ycombinator, @gustaf, @uncorkcap, @susanwliu, @GeodesicCap, @arvindayyala, @FundersClub, @mittal, @mantisVC, @AlexPallNY, @ShaanVP, @lennysan, @moizali, @ringmybeller, @khency6, @asturnerr, @maariabajwa and so many others.

[Jeff Clavier @jeff]

A huge thank you to @Erica_Wenger for inviting me onto her podcast! I really enjoyed our wide-ranging conversation. Fantastic work!

Take a listen!

[Erica Wenger @Erica_Wenger]

My conversation with Jeff Clavier.

@jeff is the founder of @uncorkcap, one of Silicon Valley’s earliest seed-stage venture firms, with early investments in companies like Fitbit, @Postmates, and @eventbrite .

We discuss how he became one of the earliest dedicated seed investors, what it takes to raise a venture fund, the mistakes that turned an eight-week fundraise into a nearly two-year process, and what LPs actually look for when backing emerging managers.

We also discuss:

- Why the world doesn’t need another generic seed fund
- What emerging managers need to prove before raising institutional capital
- How to stand out when competing for limited LP capital
- Why winning competitive deals matters when raising a fund
- Why DPI matters more than paper markups
- How Jeff thinks about secondaries and returning capital to LPs
- What Jeff learned from passing on companies like @Uber and @twilio
- Why supporting founders across multiple rounds can compound your reputation
- How to successfully transition leadership at a venture firm
- Why AI startups are scaling faster than anything Jeff has seen before

Enjoy!
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
03:05 - The Fundraise That Took Jeff Nearly Two Years
08:38 - How Jeff Launched One of the First Seed Funds
13:26 - Why DPI Matters More Than Paper Markups
23:28 - What LPs Actually Want From Emerging Managers
26:26 - How to Build a Venture Firm That Outlives You
30:45 - Life Outside Venture Capital
36:46 - Why Jeff Is Betting on Deep Tech and Hardware
43:08 - Why Jeff Passed on Investing in Uber
47:45 - How Jeff Led the Seed Round for Postmates
51:09 - Trailblazer Trade-Offs

[Loft @LoftOrbital]

Congressman @kevinmullin visited @LoftOrbital for a tour and a fireside chat with COO Alex Greenberg @thatbergness where the conversation turned to how AI is reshaping what's possible in orbit. From on-orbit inference to faster decision-making for operators, this is the kind of work we're proud to show a member of Congress up close.

Thanks to the Congressman and his team for spending the time with us.

[Tripp Jones @thistrippjones]

Very excited to announce @uncorkcap's investment in @epsilonhealth, which is coming out of stealth with $27.6 million in funding, led by @alley_corp and alongside our friends @ReneGadePtnrs, SemperVirens, and @jaltma.

Radiology is facing a serious capacity crisis. Demand for imaging keeps rising and there aren’t enough radiologists to keep up. Patients are waiting days for results that take minutes to interpret.

Naturally, the industry has responded with over 1,000 AI tools for radiology. But that doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem (wait times are actually longer than a decade ago!).

The Epsilon team have taken a radically different approach: instead of building another tool for radiologists, they’re building an AI-native radiology practice from the ground up.

They’re basically building what I call an Iron Man suit for radiologists. Epsilon makes each radiologist dramatically more capable without asking them to learn another tool or change the way they work.

They’re already processing 2,500+ studies a day and are on track to interpret 1% of all U.S. x-rays in their first year. Incredibly proud of the entire team and what they’re building.

More on what they’re building and why we invested in our blog.

https://t.co/P1l8OyYrHe

[Mirai Labs @trymirai]

Today we are releasing our speculative decoding implementation in our inference engine uzu.

Initially for Qwen3.6 27B, with support for Qwen3.8 27B and Muse Glimmer coming soon.

On Apple M5-series chips, we outperform MTPLX (MLX + speculative decoding) by almost 2x, and llama.cpp by over 3x at comparable quantization levels, with the strongest gains achieved on mathematical reasoning and coding tasks.

Run the model:
Mirai-M: https://t.co/PSSBOQ3Tyw
Mirai-L: https://t.co/Y4hhKAFr8n

Explore the benchmarks:
https://t.co/eXtL3Zh5lq

Learn more about our speculative decoding implementation:
https://t.co/SrJmMIeZQA

Our draft model, quantized checkpoint format, verification algorithm, and GPU kernels are co-designed from the ground up around the latest Apple M5 chips to take maximum advantage of GPU Neural Accelerators.

Unlike popular speculative decoding architectures such as model-native MTP, which produce small draft chains of 3-4 tokens at a time, we use extremely aggressive speculative budgets of 16-32 tokens. This enables us to use Neural Accelerator-backed GEMM kernels, achieving maximum utilization of hardware arithmetic throughput.

[Andy McLoughlin @Bandrew]

Congratulations to our portfolio co Coder (@coderhq) and SpaceXAI/Cursor teams on this exciting integration and partnership.

The world's largest orgs still block and stall agentic rollouts - they just couldn't get the tooling through security review. Today's announcement unblocks that.

Now they can responsibly deploy the best AI tooling in a way that is safe, compliant, and secure.