The partners have already begun making investments. Their fund, named Zero Shot—a clever reference to the AI training concept—was established by a team that includes several early OpenAI members who somewhat unexpectedly transitioned into venture capital.

Three of the founding partners come from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, who previously led applied engineering during the launches of DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Codex, is now at the robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, recognized as OpenAI’s original prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI podcast, also founded Interdimensional, an AI deployment consultancy. Shawn Jain, an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, later moved into venture capital and founded his own generative AI startup, Synthefy.

They are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, a former founding partner at 01A, the growth-stage venture firm started by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The fifth founding member is Brett Rounsaville, who has a background at Twitter and Disney and serves as CEO at Mayne’s Interdimensional.

After leaving OpenAI, the group found themselves frequently approached for consulting by VCs seeking insights on emerging AI technologies and by founder friends looking for advice. This demand inspired Mayne to launch his consulting firm. “Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and interested in starting companies,” Mayne noted.

The alumni observed significant mismatches between the AI startups receiving funding and what the market actually required. “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 thinking.

Following discussions with institutions and family offices, they secured an initial $20 million and set a target of $100 million for their first fund. They have already completed several investments.

Zero Shot provided backing to early OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup, Worktrace AI. The company is creating an AI-driven management software platform designed to help enterprises automate tasks by first identifying what should be automated. Worktrace AI raised a $10 million seed round from notable investors like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, according to PitchBook estimates.

The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup focused on developing next-generation, AI-enhanced factory robotics. It recently closed a $13.5 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures.

Zero Shot has made a third investment in a startup that remains in stealth mode.

**The AI Bets They’re Avoiding**

Zero Shot’s founders believe they have a clearer understanding of AI’s trajectory than many venture capitalists. This perspective helps them not only select startups to support but also identify which ideas to steer clear of.

For example, Mayne is cautious about most iterations of “vibe coding,” anticipating that model makers, with their coding expertise, will soon make subscriptions to such platforms seem unnecessary. He is similarly skeptical of most startups working on “digital twins.” After conducting due diligence on several, including building a reasoning model to test them, he concluded that a standard large language model performs just as effectively.

Regarding startups focused on embodiment training data for robotics, Morikawa commented, “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,” but added, “that’s nowhere near possible.”

“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.

In addition to the investing founders, Zero Shot has enlisted several recognizable names as advisors, who will receive a share of the fund’s carried interest. The advisors include Diane Yoon, OpenAI’s former head of people; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, a former product leader at OpenAI.