Jean-Francois Clavier

Jean-Francois Clavier General Information

Description

Mr. Jean-Francois Clavier is the Founder and serves as Managing Partner at Uncork Capital. He serves as Board Member at Loft Orbital, Messari and Arch Systems . An early angel investor in Web 2.0, Mr. Clavier 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, Poshmark, Hired and Vungle. The portfolio has also seen acquisitions by Groupon, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo and AOL. The firm is currently investing out of its $85M Fund IV, making 16 commitments of $850K per year in mobile/cloud SaaS, consumer services, connected hardware, marketplaces and healthcare IT. Born, raised and educated in France, Mr. Clavier graduated with a MS in Computer Science and a degree in Distributed Computing. He joined Effix, a financial services 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 Mr. Clavier 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. In 2004, Mr. Clavier left RVC to start SoftTech VC and invest in the early pioneers of Consumer Internet. Within a couple of years, he was being recognized in the media as one of the "super angels", and in 2007, he subsequently raised one of the first micro-VC funds, $15M Fund II. After three years, and 60+ investments closed on his own, Mr. Clavier built a team and raised a larger, $55M Fund III that invested in 55 companies. In June 2014, the firm celebrated its 10-year anniversary, its move to San Francisco and the close of Fund IV. Mr. Clavier was appointed on the board of the National Venture Capital Association in 2015, a 4-year mandate. He has also been on the Advisory Board of Telefonica Digital since 2010. In the SoftTech portfolio, he sits on the boards of Curse, Handshake, DroneDeploy and Shippo.