Jeff Clavier

Jean-Francois “Jeff” Clavier is the Founder and Managing Partner of Uncork Capital (formerly SoftTech VC), one of the original seed VC firms in Silicon Valley, having closed 200+ investments since 2004. An early angel investor in Web 2.0, Jeff and his team have backed successful startups like Mint (Intuit), Kongregate (GameStop), Brightroll (Yahoo), LiveRamp (Acxiom), Milo (eBay), Wildfire (Google), Bleacher Report (Turner), Gnip (Twitter), Fitbit (NYSE:FIT), Eventbrite, Sendgrid (NYSE:SEND), Poshmark, Hired, Postmates, Shippo, Front and Molekule. The portfolio has also seen acquisitions by Groupon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL. The firm is currently investing out of its $100M Fund V, making on average 15 seed commitments of $1M per year in mobile/cloud saas, consumer services, connected devices, marketplaces and “frontier tech” (AI, AR/VR, autonomous vehicles, digital manufacturing, material science, space tech).

Born, raised and educated in France, Jeff graduated with a MS in CS. He joined Effix, a fintech startup, as one of the initial developers while still at school and eventually led it as CTO. After 5 years, Reuters acquired the company and Jeff expanded his remit to several product and development organizations in Europe and the USA. In 2000, he moved to Silicon Valley as General Partner for RVC, the $450M venture fund affiliated with Reuters.

Jeff was appointed on the board of the National Venture Capital Association in 2015, a 4-year mandate. In the Uncork portfolio, he sits on the boards of Arch Systems, DocSend, Intermix, Pi Charging, Scroll and other stealth companies. He is a veteran of the Forbes Midas List of top venture capitalists in the world.

One of the early VC bloggers in 2004, Jeff is now a popular conference speaker and social media/TV commentator. When he is not spending time with Uncork’s portfolio companies, Jeff enjoys traveling, skiing, hiking, scuba diving, collecting wine and hanging out with friends and family.