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

A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has made its first close on its $100 million goal, the founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written a couple of 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.

Three of the founding partners hail from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, the former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, is now at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer, is well-known as the host of The OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded Interdimensionalan AI deployment consultancy. And Shawn Jain is an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, who then became a VC and is a 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 CEO at Mayne’s Interdimensional.

The OpenAI alums have “been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, 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.

“Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and interested in doing companies,” Mayne said.

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 said, recalling the decision.

After conversations with institutions and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners set their sights on a $100 million initial 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 enterprises automate tasks by first discovering what should 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-gen, AI-enhanced factory robotics. It recently raised a $13.5 million seedled by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup, too, which is still in stealth.

The AI bets they’re skipping

Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of AI better than many a VC. That helps them pick startups to back, but also identify which ideas to avoid.

Mayne, for instance, 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 tells TechCrunch that, with his deep knowledge of AI and robotics, he’s not a fan of the many “ergo-centric video data companies right now in robotics.” Those are 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 of such video data, but “that’s nowhere near possible.”

Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups doing “digital twins.” He’s 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 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 said.

In addition to the investing founders, Zero Shot has some recognizable names who have agreed to be advisors, and will get a share of the “carried interest” that the fund returns. The advisors include Diane Yoon, OpenAI’s former head of people; Steve Dowling, the former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product leader at OpenAI.