Sep 12, 2023

Eric Millette After raising a fresh $400 million to fund seed stage companies, venture capital firm Uncork Capital has now brought on a fifth partner. The firm announced Tuesday that it had hired Amy Saper away from her position as a partner at the blue-chip VC firm Accel, where she’s specialized in early-stage investments in fintech and B2B software. “I just discovered that my heart is really in the seed stage,” Saper told Forbes. “I was excited to be at a place where seed is really the bread and butter and my partners shared the same enthusiasm for being the first check.” Saper’s hire is part of an aggressive expansion plan that Uncork — known for being one of the first checks into companies like Postmates , Poshmark and email startup Front — has been charting over the last two years. According to managing partner Andy McLoughlin, it wanted to double the size of its investment vehicles from $200 million to $400 million and hire a new partner with expertise in fintech, one of the firm’s blind spots. Saper fit the bill. In June, Uncork announced its $400 million set of new funds after a “tough” fundraising effort that McLoughlin says took nearly a year (compare that to eight weeks for its smaller prior fund). The doubled pool of capital will allow Uncork to afford to better compete in future deals, said McLoughlin, who co-manages the firm with its founder Jeff Clavier. Saper said she had “nothing but positives” to say about her former employer, though she said “there was definitely some surprise and disappointment” when she announced she was leaving. Accel declined to comment. “As an early-stage VC, you can be a great picker and you can be a great supporter, but if you’re not seeing deals, then you’re not in the mix.” Uncork managing partner Andy McLoughlin Accel is known for leading the first institutional venture investment into Facebook in 2005 — a move which would help propel then-steward Jim Breyer to the top of the Midas List for several years — but over the years the firm has grown into a multi-pronged juggernaut. In addition to deploying capital out of a $650 million U.S.-based early stage fund (from which Saper invested), it also has two other $650 million early stage vehicles for other geographies and a set of later-stage funds sized in the billions. As time went on, Saper says she found herself gravitating specifically towards the earliest stage companies. “There’s a pressure to write larger checks,” McLoughlin says in comparing the multi-stage firm to Uncork. “They’ve got a huge fund to deploy and I think as an investor there you can’t be slinging $2 million checks to work your way through the fund.” That seed-only mandate will be possible at Uncork, and Saper told Forbes it’s the way she prefers it. “There’s something really special when the entire firm is laser-focused on that same shared priority,” she said. Saper, who before Accel worked in marketing at Twitter and Stripe, said she was also drawn to Uncork because of the chance to “help shape the next chapter for the firm in a way that is just more possible in a smaller environment.” She said she hopes to launch community-building programs, events and initiatives to put Uncork more squarely on the radar in the fintech space, where McLoughlin said the firm has missed out on seeing some of the best deals: “As an early-stage VC, you can be a great picker and you can be a great supporter, but if you’re not seeing deals, then you’re not in the mix.” McLoughlin maintains he has no plans to expand beyond its core seed expertise and one day become a diversified operation, like Accel. “I don’t have any ambitions to build the next hundred-person venture company,” he said. “One of the reasons that what we do works so well is because it’s small and there’s no politicking and everybody knows pretty intimately what the rest of the team are working on.”