A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has closed on its $100 million goal for the first time, the founders told TechCrunch. The partners have already written several checks.
It is called a fund Zero Shot (a game in AI training) and its co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who became VCs almost by accident.
Three of the founding partners come from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, former head of application engineering at the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT via Codex, is now at robotics startup Generalist. OpenAI’s original operations engineer, Andrew Mayne, is credited as a presenter The OpenAI Podcast. Mayne also founded InterdimensionalAI placement advisor. And Shawn Jain is an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, turned VC, and founder of his own GenAI startup Synthefy.
The alums are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, formerly a founding partner at 01A. A growth stage venture company founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The foundation’s fifth founding member is Brett Rounsaville, formerly of Twitter and Disney, who is also the CEO of Mayne’s Interdimensional.
The OpenAI alumni “have been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked together at the model maker before launching ChatGPT during its wildest growth years.
After their breakup, they all found themselves constantly being hit by founder friends seeking advice and consulting with VCs on emerging AI technology. This is what motivated May to start a consulting company.
“Some of our friends have come out of OpenAI and are interested in companies,” Mayne said.
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Alums saw gaps between many AI startups that were funded and what the market really needed.
“Maybe we should start our own fund because we have a good sense of where things are going and we have such great access to people who we think are incredible builders,” Mayne recalled of the decision.
After conversations with businesses and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners set their sights on a seed fund of $100 million. They have already written several checks.
Zero Shot supported early OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup is developing an AI-powered management software platform to help businesses automate tasks by discovering what needs to be automated first. Worktrace AI has raised $10 million in seed funding from notables like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Foundation, according to PitchBook estimates.
The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on next-generation, AI-powered factory robots. Recently It raised $13.5 million in seed fundingManaged by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup, which is still under wraps.
The AI bets they jumped on
Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of artificial intelligence better than many VCs. This helps them select startups to support, but also identifies which ideas to avoid.
Mayne, for example, is down on most iterations of vibe coding, as he predicts that model makers will quickly make subscribing to such platforms feel redundant with their coding practices.
Morikawa tells TechCrunch that with his background in AI and robotics, he’s not a fan of “ergo-centric video data companies in robotics right now.” These are startups working on training data for robotics.
“There’s a lot of hope and prayer in the research world right now that someone will figure out how to move the embodiment gap,” Morikawa said of this kind of video data, but “it’s not possible anywhere.”
Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups that do “digital twins.” He did due diligence on some, including building a reasoning model to test them, and concluded that the regular LLM model worked just as well.
“There’s a real skill in predicting where these models will go next because it’s extremely unclear. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.
In addition to the founders investing, Zero Shot has some big names who have agreed to be advisors and will receive a share of the “carried interest” the fund returns. Advisors include Diane Yoon, former head of people at OpenAI; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product lead at OpenAI.
