OpenAI Alumni Quietly Launch $100M Venture Fund
A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has made its first close on its $100 million goal, with the founders already writing their first checks.
The fund is called Zero Shot (a play on the AI training term) and its co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who found themselves becoming VCs almost by serendipity.
The OpenAI Connection
Three of the founding partners hail directly from OpenAI:
- Evan Morikawa: Former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex
- Andrew Mayne: OpenAI's original prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI podcast
- Shawn Jain: Engineer and former researcher at OpenAI
They're joined by VC Kelly Kovacs (previously at 01A) and Brett Rounsaville (formerly of Twitter and Disney).
Zero Shot fund founders from left to right: Evan Morikawa, Shawn Jain, Andrew Mayne, Kelly Kovacs, and Brett Rounsaville
From Consulting to Investing
The OpenAI alums have "been friends for years," having worked together at the model maker from before it released ChatGPT through its wildest growth years.
After leaving, they all found themselves constantly being hit up to consult for VCs about emerging AI tech, and by founder friends wanting advice. That's what propelled Mayne to start his consulting company, Interdimensional.
"Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and interested in doing companies," Mayne said.
Identifying Market Gaps
The alums saw gaping holes between the many AI startups being funded and what the market really needed.
"Maybe we should do our own fund, because we think we have a pretty good sense of where things are headed, and we have this great access to people who we think are incredible builders," Mayne recalled.
After conversations with institutions and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners set their sights on a $100 million initial fund.
Early Investments
Zero Shot has already backed several startups:
- Worktrace AI: Developing AI-based management software platform to help enterprises automate tasks
- Foundry Robotics: Working on next-gen, AI-enhanced factory robotics
- A third startup still in stealth mode
What They're Avoiding
Zero Shot's founders say they understand the direction of AI better than many VCs. That helps them pick startups to back, but also identify which ideas to avoid.
Mayne is bearish on most iterations of vibe coding because he foresees that the model makers, with their coding expertise, are going to quickly make subscriptions to such platforms feel unnecessary.
Morikawa is not a fan of the many "ergo-centric video data companies right now in robotics" - startups working on embodiment training data for robotics.
"There's a lot of hoping and praying going on right now that someone in the research world will figure out how to transfer the embodiment gap," Morikawa said, "but that's nowhere near possible."
Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups doing "digital twins," having concluded that a regular LLM model works just as well after building reasoning models to test them.
"There is a real skill in knowing how to predict where these models will be going next, because it's extremely not obvious. It's not linear," Morikawa emphasized.
Advisory Support
In addition to the investing founders, Zero Shot has secured advisors who will get a share of the fund's carried interest, including:
- Diane Yoon, OpenAI's former head of people
- Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple
- Luke Miller, former product leader at OpenAI
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