A new venture capital fund deeply connected to OpenAI has achieved its first close towards a $100 million target, the founders told TechCrunch. The partners have already made several investments.
Named Zero Shot, a nod to an AI training term, the fund is co-founded by several OpenAI veterans who have become venture capitalists somewhat serendipitously.
Three of the founding partners are from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, formerly head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, has moved to robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI podcast, also founded the AI consultancy Interdimensional. Shawn Jain, an ex-OpenAI engineer and researcher, became a VC and founded his own GenAI startup, Synthefy.
Joining them is VC Kelly Kovacs, a previous founding partner at 01A, the growth-stage firm started by Dick Costolo and Adam Bain. Brett Rounsaville, formerly with Twitter and Disney and now CEO at Mayne’s Interdimensional, is the fifth founding member.
The OpenAI alumni have “been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked at the AI model maker through its major growth periods.
After leaving, they found themselves frequently consulting VCs on emerging AI technologies and offering advice to founder friends. This led Mayne to start his consulting company.
“Several friends were emerging from OpenAI interested in startups,” Mayne said.
The group noticed significant gaps between the AI startups being financed and market needs.
They decided to start their own fund, believing they had a strong understanding of future directions and valuable connections to talented builders, Mayne recalled.
After discussions with institutions and family offices and closing an initial $20 million, the partners aimed for a $100 million initial fund and have already made some investments.
Zero Shot supported early OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI, which is developing AI-based management software to automate tasks by identifying what to automate. Worktrace AI raised a $10 million seed round with investors like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, as estimated by Pitchbook.
The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a company focused on next-gen AI-driven factory robotics, which recently raised $13.5M in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has invested in a third startup still in stealth mode.
The AI bets they’re skipping
Zero Shot’s founders believe they have a better grasp on AI’s direction than many VCs, aiding them in choosing startups to support while identifying which ideas to avoid.
Mayne, for instance, is skeptical of most vibe coding iterations as he predicts that model makers’ expertise will make subscriptions to such platforms obsolete.
Morikawa, with his extensive AI and robotics knowledge, is critical of the “ergo-centric video data companies” in robotics, which focus on embodiment training data. Morikawa said there is unfounded optimism regarding the potential for research to transfer the embodiment gap, which is currently unfeasible.
Mayne also doubts most “digital twins” startups, having evaluated them and concluded that a regular LLM model performs equally well.
“It’s a skill to predict the next direction for these models as it’s not straightforward. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.
In addition to the investing founders, Zero Shot boasts notable advisors who will receive a share of the fund’s “carried interest.” These advisors include Diane Yoon, OpenAI’s former head of people; Steve Dowling, ex-head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product leader at OpenAI.