A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has closed its $100 million target for the first time, the founders told TechCrunch. The partners have already signed a couple of checks.
The background is called zero shot (a play on the AI training term) and his co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who became VCs almost by chance.
Three of the founding partners come from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, is now at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, the original announcements engineer at OpenAI, is known as the host of The OpenAI Podcast. Mayne also founded interdimensionalan AI implementation consultancy. And Shawn Jain is an engineer and former OpenAI researcher, who later became a VC and founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy.
The students are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, formerly a founding partner of 01A, the growth-stage venture firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The fund’s fifth founding member is Brett Rounsaville, formerly of Twitter and Disney, who is also CEO of Mayne’s Interdimensional.
The OpenAI alumni have “been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked together at the model maker since before it launched ChatGPT during its wildest growth years.
After leaving, they all found themselves constantly called upon to consult venture capitalists about emerging AI technology and founder friends who wanted advice. That’s what prompted Mayne to start his consulting company.
“Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and were interested in starting companies,” Mayne said.
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Students saw big gaps between the many AI startups being funded and what the market really needed.
“Maybe we should start our own fund, because we think we have a pretty good idea of where things are going and we have great access to people who we think are incredible builders,” Mayne said, recalling the decision.
After conversations with institutions and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners set their sights on an initial fund of $100 million. Some checks have already been signed.
Zero Shot backed OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup is developing an AI-based management software platform to help companies automate tasks by first discovering what needs to be automated. Worktrace AI raised a $10 million seed round from notables like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, PitchBook estimates.
The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on next-generation industrial robotics enhanced with AI. Recently raised a seed of 13.5 million dollarsled by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has also invested in a third startup, which is still under wraps.
The AI bets that are being skipped
Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of AI better than many venture capitalists. That helps them choose startups to back, but also identify which ideas to avoid.
Mayne, for example, is bearish on most iterations of vibe coding because he predicts that model makers, with their coding expertise, will quickly make subscriptions to such platforms seem unnecessary.
Morikawa tells TechCrunch that, with his deep knowledge of artificial intelligence and robotics, he is not a fan of the many “ergocentric video data companies currently pursuing robotics.” These are startups working on incarnation training data for robotics.
“There are a lot of hopes and prayers right now that someone in the research world will figure out how to transfer the incarnation gap,” Morikawa said of that video data, but “that’s not even remotely possible.”
Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups making “digital twins.” He has done due diligence on some, including creating a reasoning model to test them, and has concluded that a regular LLM model works just as well, he said.
“There’s a real skill in knowing how to predict where these models are going to go next, because it’s not obvious at all. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.
In addition to the investor founders, Zero Shot has some recognizable names who have agreed to be advisors and will get a portion of the “carried interest” returned by the fund. Advisors include Diane Yoon, former chief of staff at OpenAI; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product lead at OpenAI.
