A new fund with deep ties to OpenAI has made its first close on its $100 million goal, the founders told TechCrunch. Our partners have written a few checks.
The fund is called Zero Shot (a game on AI training) and its founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who found themselves becoming VCs almost out of serendipity.
Three of the founding partners are from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, who was the head of application engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT with Codex, is now at the first robotics center Generalist. Andrew Mayne, an OpenAI developer, is best known as the host of the OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded Interdimensional, an AI consulting and outsourcing company. And Shawn Jain, an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI, turned VC and co-founder of his GenAI startup, Synthefy.
The alums are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, a former founding partner at 01A, the growth stage company 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.
The OpenAI alums “have been friends for years,” Mayne told TechCrunch, having worked together at the model maker since before it spun off ChatGPT during its extraordinary growth years.
After leaving, they all found themselves constantly being tapped to connect with VCs about emerging AI technologies, as well as fellow founders looking for advice. That’s what led Mayne to start his own communications company.
“Some of our friends were coming out of OpenAI and were interested in doing companies,” Mayne said.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Alums saw gaps between many AI startups being funded and what the market really needed.
“We should probably do our own fund, because we think we have a very good sense of where things are going, and we have very good access to people who we think are amazing builders,” Mayne said, recalling the decision.
After discussions with institutions and family offices and closing 20 million dollars, the partners put their vision in the first fund of 100 million dollars. They have already written a few checks.
Zero Shot supports the original OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup develops 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 notables like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, Pitchbook estimates.
The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on AI-enhanced industrial robots. It recently raised a $13.5M seed round, led by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup, which is still in its infancy.
Bet the AI is jumping
Zero Shot’s founders say they understand the direction of AI better than most VCs. That helps them take the beginnings backwards, but also identify which ideas to avoid.
Mayne, for example, is bearish on the proliferation of vibe coding because he foresees that model makers, with their coding skills, will quickly make registering on such platforms feel unnecessary.
Morikawa tells TechCrunch that, with his deep knowledge of AI and robotics, he’s not a fan of the “ergo-centric video data companies right now in robotics.” Those are startups that work on robot embodiment training data.
“There’s a lot of hoping and praying going on right now that someone in the research world will figure out how to bridge the similarity gap,” Morikawa said of such video data, but “it’s nowhere near possible.”
Mayne is similarly skeptical of many startups making “digital twins.” He carefully conducted several, including developing a conceptual model to test them, and concluded that the standard LLM model works just as well, he said.
“There’s a real ability to be able to predict how these species will move next, because it’s not easy. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.
In addition to the founders of the investment, Zero Shot has some well-known names who have agreed to be advisors, and will receive a portion of the “carried interest” returned by the fund. Advisors include Diane Yoon, former head of people for OpenAI; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product lead at OpenAI.
