Firms & Funds

Uncork names McLoughlin a managing partner

The venture firm has promoted Andy McLoughlin while also adding two new investing partners.

-

Uncork Capital has promoted Andy McLoughlin to co-lead the fund as managing partner along with firm founder Jeff Clavier.

McLoughlin’s promotion comes about six months after Stephanie Palmeri announced her transition to venture partner.

Andy McLoughlin, Uncork Capital

McLoughlin, who is currently a partner at the firm, joined Uncork in 2015. Before that, he was an active angel investor, having backed such companies as Pipedrive (acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.5 billion), as well as Postmates (acquired by Uber for $2.65 billion).

Clavier said in a Medium blog post that McLoughlin helped the firm identify many of the breakout companies Uncork invested in, including unicorns LaunchDarkly and Human Interest. In the process, he exposed Uncork to the field of developer tools and APIs.

McLoughlin previously co-founded Huddle, an enterprise collaboration platform, in 2006 with Alastair Mitchell. Huddle raised more than $80 million in venture funding before its acquisition in 2017 by Ideagen. Mitchell is now a partner at EQT Ventures.

Uncork adds two partners

Uncork also added two new general partners to its roster: Susan Liu and Tripp Jones.

Liu worked with Scale Venture Partners looking into workplace trends and enterprise software. Liu sourced several successful companies for Scale, including software tutorial platform WalkMe, automated payroll service Papaya Global and project management platform Wrike.

Venture Capital Journal named Liu one its 40 Rising Stars in January 2020.

Jones was previously with August Capital investing in several sectors. He has invested in pet subscription box company Bark and HipCamp, which is described as an Airbnb for the outdoors.

Along with a new managing partner, Uncork unveiled its new investment strategy. The venture firm plans to focus on four areas: applications and the future of work; APIs, developer tools and infrastructure; consumer and marketplaces; and frontier technology.

Clavier also said that the firm, which has mostly focused on seed-stage companies in its 17-year history, will also invest growth stage capital in Uncork-seeded start-ups and new companies the firm hadn’t previously backed.

Uncork raised $100 million for its sixth early-stage fund and $100 million for its second opportunity fund in 2019.