A new venture capital fund with close ties to OpenAI has closed its first $100 million round, the founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written some 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 out of thin air.
Three of the founding partners come from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, the former engineering lead during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, is now at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, the original command engineer of OpenAI, is known as the host The OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded Interdimensionalan AI development consultancy. And Shawn Jain is an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI who went on to become a VC and is the founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy.
The alums are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, previously a founding partner at 01A; the growth-stage venture firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The fifth founding member of the fund is Brett Rounsaville, formerly of Twitter and Disney, who is also the CEO of Mayne’s Interdimensional.
OpenAI alums “have been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked with the model maker since before ChatGPT launched in its wildest years of development.
After they left, they all found themselves constantly being tapped for advice by VCs on emerging AI technology and by founder friends who wanted advice. This is what prompted Mayne to start his consulting firm.
“Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and were interested in starting companies,” Mayne said.
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The alums saw gaps 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 really good sense of where things are going and we have this great access to people who we think are incredible builders,” Mayne said, recalling the decision.
After talks with foundations and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners set their sights on a seed fund of $100 million. They’ve already written a few checks.
Zero Shot backed OpenAI early product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup is developing an AI-based management software platform to help businesses automate tasks by first figuring out what needs to be automated. Worktrace AI has raised a $10 million seed round from the likes of Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, PitchBook estimates.
The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on next-generation, AI-enhanced factory robotics. Recently raised a $13.5 million seed roundled by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup, which is still in stealth.
The AI bets they bypass
Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of AI better than many VCs. This helps them support startups, but also identify which ideas to avoid.
Mayne, for example, is down on most iterations of vibe coding because he predicts that mod makers, with their coding expertise, will quickly make subscriptions to such platforms feel redundant.
Morikawa tells TechCrunch that, with his deep knowledge of artificial intelligence and robotics, he’s not a fan of the many “business-centric video data companies right now in robotics.” These are startups working on embedding 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 convey the void of embodiment,” Morikawa said of such video data, but “that’s not possible at all.”
Mayne is equally skeptical of most digital twin startups. He has done due diligence on a few, including building a reasoning model to test them, and has concluded that a regular LLM model works just as well, he said.
“There’s real skill in knowing how to predict where these models are going to go next because it’s extremely non-obvious. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.
In addition to the founding investors, Zero Shot has a number of recognizable names who have agreed to be advisors and will receive a share 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.
