OpenAI alumni have been quietly investing from a new $100 million fund

A new venture capital fund with deep ties to OpenAI has achieved its first close on its $100 million target, the founders tell TechCrunch. The partners have already written some checks.

The fund is called Zero Shot (a play on the term AI training) and the co-founder’s team includes several OpenAI OGs who found themselves becoming venture capitalists almost by accident.

Three of the founding partners hail from OpenAI. Ivan Morikawa, former head of applied engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, now works at robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Main, the original OpenAI architect, is best known as the host of the OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded Inter Dimension, an AI deployment consulting firm. and Sean Jain, a former engineer and researcher at OpenAI, who went on to become a venture capitalist and founder of his GenAI startup, Synthefy.

The graduates are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, who was previously a founding partner at 01A, the growth-stage venture firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Payne. The fund’s fifth founding member is Brett Rounsaville, who previously worked at Twitter and Disney, and is also the CEO of Mayne’s Inter Dimensional.

The OpenAI graduates “have been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked together at the model maker before ChatGPT was released during its wildest growth years.

After they left, they all found themselves constantly receiving advice from venture capitalists about emerging AI technology, and from founder friends who wanted advice. This is what prompted Mayne to start his consulting company.

“Some of our friends had come out of OpenAI and were interested in starting companies,” Mayne said.

Alumni saw significant gaps between many AI startups being funded and what the market really needs.

“Maybe we should start our own fund, because we think we have a good sense of where things are going, and we have great access to people who we think are great builders,” Mayne said, recalling the decision.

After holding conversations with foundations and family offices and closing the first $20 million, the partners have set their sights on a $100 million seed round. They’ve already written some checks.

Zero Shot was backed by early OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup is developing an AI-based management software platform to help organizations automate tasks by discovering what needs to be automated first. Worktrace AI has raised a $10 million seed round from notable figures like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, according to Pitchbook estimates.

The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on the next generation of AI-powered factory robots. It recently raised a $13.5 million seed round, led by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup as well, which is still in stealth mode.

AI bets they’re skipping

Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the AI ​​trend better than many venture capital firms. This helps them choose startups to support, but it also helps them decide which ideas to avoid.

Mayne, for example, is pessimistic about most iterations of dynamic programming because he expects that modellers, with their programming expertise, will quickly make subscribing to such platforms unnecessary.

Morikawa tells TechCrunch that, with his deep knowledge of AI and robotics, he’s not a fan of many of the “environmentally focused video data companies currently in the robotics space.” These are startups that are working on fleshing out training data for robots.

“There’s a lot of hoping and praying now that someone in the research world will figure out how to transfer the embodiment gap,” Morikawa said of this video data, but “it’s not even close to possible.”

Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups doing “digital twins.” He said he did due diligence on a few of them, including building a logic model to test them, and concluded that the regular LLM model works just as well.

“There’s a real skill in knowing how to predict where these models are going next, because it’s not clear at all. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.

In addition to the institutional investors, Zero Shot has some well-known names that have agreed to be advisors, and will receive a share of the “carried interest” that the fund returns. Advisors include Dian Yuen, former head of the OpenAI division; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product lead at OpenAI.