Five former OpenAI employees have launched Zero Shot, a venture fund targeting $100 million to invest in early-stage AI startups, TechCrunch reported. The fund completed its first close at $20 million and has already written checks.
The founding partners: Evan Morikawa, former head of applied engineering at OpenAI during the launches of DALL-E, ChatGPT, and Codex, now at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI Podcast, who also founded AI deployment consultancy Interdimensional. Shawn Jain, an engineer and former OpenAI researcher who became a VC and founded GenAI startup Synthefy. Kelly Kovacs, previously a founding partner at 01A (the growth-stage firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain). Brett Rounsaville, formerly of Twitter and Disney, now CEO at Interdimensional.
“Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and interested in doing companies,” Mayne told TechCrunch. “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.”
First Investments
Zero Shot backed Worktrace AI, a startup founded by early OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang that develops AI management software to help enterprises discover which tasks should be automated before automating them. Worktrace AI raised a $10 million seed round from investors including Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, per PitchBook estimates cited by TechCrunch.
The fund also invested in Foundry Robotics, which builds AI-enhanced factory robotics and recently raised a $13.5 million seed led by Khosla Ventures. A third investment remains in stealth.
What They’re Avoiding
The founders are using their insider knowledge to identify overhyped categories. Mayne is bearish on most vibe-coding startups, arguing that model makers will rapidly make those platforms feel unnecessary with their own coding capabilities. Morikawa is skeptical of “ergo-centric video data companies in robotics” working on embodiment training data, telling TechCrunch that transferring the embodiment gap is “nowhere near possible.” Mayne is equally critical of most digital twin startups.
The fund joins a growing cohort of operator-led AI vehicles where alumni from frontier labs translate their technical knowledge into investment theses. Zero Shot’s bet: the most valuable AI companies in the next cycle will be built on agent infrastructure, not by the labs themselves.