When you’re about to enter into unknown territory, you need more than a guidebook. You need a guide you can trust.

When you’re about to enter into unknown territory, you need more than a guidebook. You need a guide you can trust.

How We Invest

Uncork is a seed-stage venture capital firm with over $900 million under management. We are currently investing out of two funds: a $200M Seed fund (Uncork VII) and a $200M Opportunity fund earmarked for larger investments in mature, existing portfolio companies (Uncork Plus III).

When we believe in your vision and your team, we get conviction quickly. We often write the first large check a company receives. We aren’t afraid to assume the responsibilities of lead investor, and we are also happy to co-lead or follow alongside other great seed investors. When we commit, we leverage our relationships with other early-stage investors to help you fill your round with the best, most useful investors.

*While cash is important, entrepreneurs choose to work with us for the help, support and useful advice we provide. (Please see “How We Work” section below for more details.)

We invest at fair valuations on fair terms with total transparency (when your term sheets are clean, there’s nothing to hide). All companies and valuations are different. We are flexible on check size based on your needs, but as a general rule: Our average initial investment is $2 million; it can be as low as $1.5 million or as high as $4 million. We aim for an initial ownership position between 10% and 12%+ when we lead a round, and between 8% and 10% when we don’t.

We stay deeply involved with the founding team throughout the most intense period of a company’s life: the early years. As new investors join the board, we transition out to make room. Even then, we remain supportive and available to the team for the whole journey — no matter what the outcome. Over the years, we have seen successful entrepreneurs come back to us for funding two or three times.

Whether we are the lead of your round, or a member of the syndicate, we often recommend to add an investor seat to the board at seed stage. It’s not about taking control — it will remain in your hands. But it will help you get in the habit of managing a board in advance of your Series A. It is not an absolute must, but if we are your largest investor, we’ll be happy to take a board seat.

What We Invest In

We look for outliers and out-performers who use technology to solve real problems for real people and real businesses.

Your product or service should be differentiated and special. You should be obsessed with the idea and uniquely qualified to build and scale it. The sector you are targeting should be large enough to support a few public companies.

B2B Applications & Services

Software applications and services that enable every business to build and operate like the best companies in the world:

Fountain, hiring automation software for hiring and managing a large workforce

Shippo, a shipping platform that helps e-commerce companies manage their shipping operations more seamlessly

Front, which takes out the pain of team inboxes and enables companies to scale customer support, hiring, sales and more.

Wrapbook, which tackles onboarding, timecards, payroll, and insurance in its powerful and easy-to-use platform for production management.

Developer Tools & Infrastructure

The introduction of infrastructure services made it faster and easier to build software startups. Now every company can build and manage software like the best companies in the world.

LaunchDarkly, which helps companies small and large test, release, and control new features and software updates.

SendGrid, an email delivery platform that processes more than thirty billion emails each month for more than fifty-five thousand customers

Tailscale is a “frustratingly simple” VPN, letting companies easily manage access to private resources and work securely from anywhere in the world.

Consumer & Marketplaces

Consumer and business marketplaces (and their offspring market networks) with strong network effects that make them hard to displace and highly scalable:

Class Dojo fosters stronger connections and better communication in and out of the classroom between teachers, parents, and students.

Poshmark’s fashion buyers-sellers create a virtuous cycle where users sell, feel the love, and buy again and again.

Hallow is the leading Catholic meditation, prayer & sleep app, helping millions globally feel closer to their religion.

Hardware & Frontier Tech

Cutting-edge technology that challenge your assumptions and change the way you look at the world:

In 2008, hardware was a new area and FitBit was our first foray. Today, our new frontiers include VR/AR, AI/ML, space, vehicle autonomy, robotics, crypto/blockchain, synthetic biology, and bioinformatics.

Loft Orbital is pioneering a new business model in space: satellites-as-a-service.

Focal Systems takes the power of deep learning computer vision and applies it to brick-and-mortar retail to automate and optimize stores.

Are you building something futuristic that doesn’t neatly fit in a bucket? We should talk.

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HOW WE WORK

Being a founder of a startup is hard. At times, it can be terrifying and lonely. You spend most of your waking hours grinding through impossible problems, and there are not a lot of people you can confide in. You need strong supporters who will help you work through challenges, eliminate roadblocks, offer a different perspective, and cheer when some great news is delivered. We strive to provide that support to our founders.

No two startups look alike, so we don’t deliver prescriptive formulas on how to build or scale. We work with you one-on-one to develop a custom plan to help you achieve your specific goals — and we adjust together as often as necessary. We also bring resources from our network so you can talk to experts about challenges you are facing.

We are transparent and straightforward. Sometimes that means encouraging and supporting you to keep going; sometimes that means telling you a truth that might be hard to hear, but has your best interests in mind. We’ll also cheer for you and challenge you to do more when we think you have the potential.

We will help you raise smart money. We have spent decades cultivating trusted relationships with other investors. We pay close attention to changing trends, teams, and interests at other VC firms in order to help you pitch the right story to the right investors at the right time for your A, B and C rounds.

The first 18 months of your company’s life are critical. It’s not just about surviving; it’s about learning a lot, fast, in a hyper-competitive environment to build the infrastructure of your future business — people, product, technology, processes. How do we know we’re making a difference? Our follow-on investors consistently tell us our companies have stronger foundations and fundamentals than many of their peers — giving them an unfair competitive advantage.

All startups — even the ones that become billion-dollar behemoths — have tough times. Lots of things can go wrong: a problem with your product eviscerates your release date; you and your cofounder disagree on the fundamental vision of your company; a rogue butterfly from China forces customs to hold up your shipping container; the US Postmaster General shows up to arrest you (in error) for shipping fraud... and on and on. When things go wrong, you need a trusted partner — someone you are comfortable telling all the gory details. We won’t walk away; we’re here to help you work out the kinks.

Start right, it makes all the difference. A good team, chosen early, can speed up your success. We show you how. We guide. We coach. We teach you the proven ways and help you figure out how they fit into what you’re building. We'll help you pick your first team, your first executives. We help you build the processes, the systems, the backbone of your venture. And most important, we help you shape a working culture that thrives. It's about getting it done, and done well. That's our part in your story.

Our platform team works for you. We’ve built a thriving community around the idea of “sharing the bread” — everyone has something of value to contribute.

Events: We bring our founders and experts from our network together more than 40 times a year — at intimate dinners, networking parties, educational roundtables and larger summits. Our goal? To spark conversations, generate ideas, and create a tight, supportive community.

Uncork Advisor Platform: Each executive has been hand-vetted for the Uncork network. Uncork portfolio companies can leverage Continuum’s network of experienced executives and industry experts to solve their most pressing business problems.

Community & Knowledge Sharing: Our Slack channel connects founders so they can share day-to-day questions and concerns, and share resources. We’ve built a robust platform which includes everything from vetted service providers to playbooks.

Professional Development Opportunities: From curated leadership programs aimed at helping our founders improve their interpersonal influence, communicate more effectively, and be more inspiring and authentic as a leader to speaking opportunities to matching founders and execs with media, we assist you in what matters.

The Uncork platform has been developed over the years thanks to our strategic partnership with Goodwin & SVB.

At Uncork Capital, we are committed to offering a safe, welcoming, and respectful environment for everyone in our entrepreneurial community. We believe people, companies, and communities thrive when teams are diverse and inclusive. We have zero tolerance for any form of harassment or discrimination by or towards our employees, consultants, vendors or other services providers, as well as by or towards our startup founders or their employees. You can view our policy here.

Any inappropriate behavior by or towards a member of our Uncork community should be reported to our internal compliance officer, Ashley Cravens at complaints@uncorkcapital.com for proper investigation. We also welcome questions about our policies and comments on fostering a more diverse ecosystem at movingforward@uncorkcapital.com.

Since the start of Uncork (then SoftTech VC), giving back to our community has been a core aspect of who we are. We recognize that we would not be where we are today if not for the support and generosity of others. We've made a point to create a culture of giving back, whether that be with our time, through donations, or otherwise. So far to date, we have given to 30+ organizations through donations and countless hours of our individual time teaching or mentoring emerging investors and entrepreneurs.

To give you an idea of the organizations we proudly contribute to, we've highlighted a few:

Callisto

All Raise

Founders Pledge

The Equal Justice Initiative

Most entrepreneurs reach out to us through our network: founders we have backed, executives we have worked with, co-investors of ours, accelerators we have worked with, etc. LinkedIn and Crunchbase are your best friends to figure out how to access us.

Still can’t find a warm intro to anyone on our team? No Problem. For pitch deck submissions, submit your deck to pitches@uncorkcapital.com. We will be in touch directly if we are interested in learning more about your company.

Our History

The Basics

Uncork Capital is a pioneer in the seed VC market. Founded in 2004 as SoftTech VC, we raised one of the very first institutional Seed funds in 2007: $15M Fund II. We have invested in more than 240 companies. More than 85 have had successful outcomes so far. We have also totally wiped out 50 times (because building and scaling a company to success is never easy). Our companies have raised more than $6.5B in follow-on financing over the years.

The firm is currently investing out of “Uncork VII,” a $200-million fund dedicated to seed stage, and “Uncork Plus III,” a $200 million opportunity fund for breakout companies either in the Uncork portfolio or its “anti-portfolio.”

The Early Days

In 2004, Jeff started making angel investments in emerging Web 2.0 companies. At that time, only a handful of individuals backed entrepreneurs building the next generation of Internet services: they became known as “Super Angels.” Companies they funded were remarkably capital efficient thanks to nascent cloud services. The early success of these angel collaborative investments created the underpinnings of the seed market as we know it today.

The Evolution of the Firm

After three years of investing on his own, Jeff raised one of the very first micro-VC funds in the summer of 2007: $15M Fund II. When he launched the fund at TechCrunch 40 in September 2007, many were skeptical that a fund making small investments would be useful to entrepreneurs. Seeding great companies like Eventbrite, Sendgrid and Fitbit proved the strategy was working, and Jeff decided to expand his team and investment strategy.

Today Uncork Capital includes six investors and six operators: Jeff Clavier and Andy McLoughlin, Co-Managing Partners; Susan Liu, Tripp Jones and Amy Saper, Partners; Sarah Du, Associate; Ashley Cravens, Head of Operations and Platform; Adriana Roche, Head of Talent; Joyce Lee, Head of Finance; Lisa (LJ) Cohen and Jimenez-Pizarro, Executive Assistants; and Tilly McLain, Head of Community.