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

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!

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!

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.

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!

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

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.

Very excited to announce @uncorkcap's investment in @epsilon_hq, 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. uncorkcapital.com/blog/inves…

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: trymirai.com/local-models/al… Mirai-L: trymirai.com/local-models/al… Explore the benchmarks: trymirai.com/metrics Learn more about our speculative decoding implementation: trymirai.com/blog/speculativ… 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.

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.

Today we're announcing Coder Agent Relay: a new way to give Cursor Cloud Agents self-hosted execution environments on your infrastructure. Launching with @SpaceXAI for regulated enterprises where code can't leave the network. 🔗 cdr.co/agentrelayx

what if AI teammates (Grok Bot, Hermes, etc.) lived everywhere? Introducing Skydive by Anything. - omnichannel (Slack, email, iMessage, CLI) - cloud native (always on, works while you sleep) - model agnostic (Fable, GPT, Deepseek, more) everyone gets full access from day one let's fly. 🪂

We're thrilled to share that Uncork has been named for the second year in a row by @TIME as one of America's Top Venture Capital firms in 2026, coming in at #39. We're honored to be included, and incredibly grateful to the founders we back. time.com/article/2026/08/12/…

Very excited to welcome @ishanator13 and @BelleNichatornT as our newest associates at @uncorkcap! In Isha and Belle, we found two thoughtful, strategic investors who know the startup world from both sides of the table. More on each of them here 👇 uncorkcapital.com/blog/welco…

July 13, 2013. That’s the day we closed the seed round of @DroneDeploy. I’d met @mikewinn, @jonomillin and @nickponline just a few weeks earlier at AngelPad Demo Day. As always, we did our diligence on the product, the team, and what was then a very nascent drone market. Part of that diligence involved watching them fly some very large drones on Treasure Island. One of the many things that convinced me to lead DroneDeploy’s seed round was the founders’ obvious founder-market fit. They were incredibly smart, highly complementary as a team, and I was genuinely excited by the opportunity to bring drones into Corporate America. It wasn’t an easy ride, though. Most of the startups funded around that time never reached scale, or disappeared along the way. Fast forward 13 years, and DroneDeploy has become a leader not just in drone software, but in the broader reality capture market, building a profitable business and an enviable market position. The road wasn't always smooth. The drone market had its ups and downs, and selling to industrial customers can be a long journey, making the team's execution all the more impressive. Through grit and perseverance, the founders not only navigated those challenges but also successfully expanded the company's reach. Today, DroneDeploy is at the forefront of deploying robots and AI into the Built World. Earlier today, DroneDeploy announced it is joining @procoretech, a highly complementary partner and a natural long-term home for the company. It’s always bittersweet to say goodbye to a portfolio company, but I am incredibly happy for Mike, Jono, Nick, the entire DroneDeploy team, and everyone who helped build the company over the past 13 years to an $845M exit. Congratulations to everyone involved, especially our co-investors who joined us on this journey. And thank you, from all of us at Uncork and our LPs, for building such an exceptional company. It’s been a privilege to be on your board for the first few years, and to be in your corner all this time. We wish you every success in your next chapter at Procore.

Congrats to @mikewinn, @nickponline, and @jonomillin on the @DroneDeploy acquisition by @procoretech. We invested in DroneDeploy in 2016 after realizing just how important drones were becoming for inspection in construction, industrial, and agricultural markets. DroneDeploy started with flying robots (that's another name for a drone!) and quickly added the ability to manage other physical AI products (a term that didn’t exist when we made the investment), including ground robotics and fixed cameras, to their original drone focus. Today DroneDeploy’s platform is used on over 3 million sites in 180 countries. Fun ten year journey (heads up physical AI takes longer). Thank you to the entire DroneDeploy team. We’re proud to have been your partners, and excited to see what you build alongside Procore. Thanks also to our industry friends at @uncorkcap (seed), @emergencecap (A), and then later @BessemerVP and @EnergizeCapital amongst others.

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 👉 uncorkcapital.com/blog/welco…

Introducing Hellyeah — the first AI marketing agent that runs growth campaign within seconds. Building a product is easy now. Getting it discovered isn't. That changes today. The product you're building deserves to be discovered. Beta's open🚀

We are releasing our first quantized checkpoints for the Qwen3.5 series of models, co-designed jointly with our inference engine to achieve maximum possible performance on Apple hardware Starting from 0.8B, 2B and 4B models trymirai.com/blog/quantizati…

Our newest release on our first quantized checkpoints for the Qwen3.5 series of models, co-designed jointly with our inference engine 🦾