OpenAI alums have been quietly investing from a new, potentially $100M fund 

A new venture capital fund with close ties to OpenAI has reached its $100 million goal for the first time, its founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written a number of checks.

The fund is called Zero shot (a play on the AI ​​training term) and the co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who found themselves becoming VCs almost by chance.

Three of the founders come from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, now works at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original fast engineer, is famous for hosting The OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded Interdimensionala consultancy firm for AI implementation. And Shawn Jain, an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, who went on to become a VC and founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy.

The alumni are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, formerly a founding member of 01A, the growth-stage venture company 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 before releasing ChatGPT during its wildest growth years.

After they left, they were all continually tapped to consult with VCs on emerging AI technology, and by founder friends seeking advice. That’s what prompted Mayne to start his consulting firm.

“Some of our friends came from OpenAI and were interested in companies,” Mayne said.

The alumni saw gaping holes between the many AI startups being funded and what the market really needed.

“We may have to fund our own 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 discussions with institutions and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners set their sights on an initial $100 million fund. They’ve already written a few checks.

Zero Shot backed early 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 has 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 AI-enabled factory robotics. It’s recently raised a $13.5 million seedled by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has also already invested in a third startup, which is still in stealth.

The AI ​​bets them to skip

Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of AI better than many VCs. That helps them choose startups to support, but also determine which ideas to avoid.

Mayne, for example, is bearish on most iterations of vibe coding, as he foresees that the modelers, with their coding expertise, will quickly make subscriptions to such platforms redundant.

Morikawa tells TechCrunch that, with his deep knowledge of AI and robotics, he is not a fan of the many “ergocentric video data companies currently active in robotics.” These are startups working on embodiment training data for robotics.

“There’s a lot of hoping and praying right now that someone in the research community will figure out how to bridge the embodiment gap,” Morikawa said of such video data, but “that’s nowhere near possible.”

Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups creating “digital twins.” He’s investigated a number of them, including building a reasoning model to test them, and has concluded that a regular LLM model works just as well, he said.

“It’s a real skill to know how to predict where these models are going to go, because it’s extremely unclear. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.

In addition to the investing founders, Zero Shot has a number of recognizable names who have agreed to be advisors and will receive a portion of the carried interest the fund returns. Advisors include Diane Yoon, the former head of OpenAI; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product lead at OpenAI.