A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has hit its $100 million goal for the first time, founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written several checks.
The fund is called Zero Shot (a play on an AI training term), and its co-founder team includes several OpenAI OGs who became VCs almost by accident.
Three of the founding partners are from OpenAI. Evan Morkawa was the head of applied engineering at the launch of DALL・E and ChatGPT through Codex, and currently works at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mainne, a former prompt engineer at OpenAI, is best known as the host of The OpenAI Podcast. Mr. Maine also founded InterDimension, an AI implementation consultancy. and Shawn Jain, an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, turned VC, and founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy.
The graduates will be joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, who was a founding partner of 01A, a 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, and CEO of Maines Interdimensional.
OpenAI alumni “have been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch. We’ve worked with model maker OpenAI since before they released ChatGPT and through its most significant growth years.
After leaving the company, they all found themselves constantly bombarded with calls from VCs about emerging AI technologies and from founder friends looking for advice. That led Mr. Mayne to start a consulting company.
“Some of our friends came from OpenAI and were interested in running companies,” Mayne said.
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Alumni noticed a gaping gap between the many AI startups being funded and what the market really needed.
“Maybe we should set up our own fund, because I think we have a pretty good idea of where things are going and we have such great access to people who we think are great architects,” Mayne said, recalling the decision.
After speaking with institutions and family offices and closing an initial $20 million, the partners set their sights on $100 million in seed funding. They’ve already written a few checks.
Zero Shot supported early OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup is developing an AI-based management software platform that enables businesses to automate tasks by first discovering what should be automated. PitchBook estimates that Worktrace AI has raised $10 million in a seed round from big names like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund.
The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on next-generation factory robotics using AI. It recently raised $13.5 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup, but this one is still in stealth mode.
I’m sure the AI is skipping.
Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of AI better than many VCs. This will help you not only choose which startups to back, but also identify which ideas to avoid.
For example, Mayne is bearish on most iterations of vibecoding, as he predicts that modelers’ coding expertise will soon make subscriptions to such platforms unnecessary.
Morikawa told TechCrunch that he is not a fan of many “human-centric video data companies in robotics” because he has deep knowledge in AI and robotics. These are startups working on embodied training data for robotics.
Regarding such video data, Morikawa said, “There’s a lot of hope and prayer right now that someone in the research community will figure out a way to transfer the materialization gap,” but that “it’s by no means impossible.”
Main is equally skeptical that most startups are implementing “digital twins.” He said that after doing due diligence on several models, including building inference models to test them, he came to the conclusion that regular LLM models work as well.
“It takes real skill to know how to predict where these models are going to go next, because it’s not very obvious. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.
In addition to the investment founders, Zero Shot has several high-profile names who have agreed to become advisors and receive a portion of the “carried interest” returned by the fund. Advisors include Diane Yoon, former head of human resources at OpenAI; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple. Luke Miller, former product lead at OpenAI.
