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

Chimera readability score 55 out of 100, Graduate reading level.

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 Interdimensional, an 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.
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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 seed, led 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.

Facts Only

* The venture capital fund Zero Shot closed its first $100 million goal.
* The fund's co-founding team includes several former OpenAI employees.
* Evan Morikawa is a co-founder and is now at the robotics startup Generalist.
* Andrew Mayne is a co-founder and host of The OpenAI podcast.
* Shawn Jain is a co-founder and founder of the GenAI startup Synthefy.
* Kelly Kovacs and Brett Rounsaville are also founding partners.
* Zero Shot invested $10 million in Worktrace AI.
* Zero Shot invested $13.5 million in Foundry Robotics.
* The founders expressed skepticism about vibe coding and digital twins.
* The fund sought $100 million as its initial goal.

Executive Summary

A new venture capital fund named Zero Shot has closed its initial $100 million goal, backed by founders with deep ties to OpenAI. The fund’s co-founding team includes several former OpenAI employees, including Evan Morikawa, Andrew Mayne, and Shawn Jain, alongside external partners like Kelly Kovacs and Brett Rounsaville. The founders leveraged their experience and network to identify gaps in the AI startup landscape. Zero Shot has already invested in startups such as Worktrace AI and Foundry Robotics. The founders express skepticism regarding certain prevalent AI investment trends, such as vibe coding and digital twins, based on their technical knowledge.

Full Take

The narrative positions internal experts, who possess unique institutional knowledge about AI model development, as the necessary arbiters for spotting genuine investment opportunities. This structure leverages the credibility of former OpenAI employees to validate a counter-narrative against broader market enthusiasm. The stated skepticism—particularly regarding "vibe coding" and "digital twins"—acts as a mechanism for defining the fund's unique value proposition: identifying what the market overlooks or overvalues. This suggests a pattern where deep technical understanding is framed as superior foresight, implicitly devaluing generalized market sentiment. The fund’s focus on identifying "gaping holes" suggests a challenge to the current funding ecosystem, implying that mainstream capital often misses opportunities identified by those deeply embedded in the research environment. The implication is that cognitive sovereignty requires privileging specialized, internally derived knowledge over generalized hype, forcing the system to value expert foresight rather than surface-level trend following.

Sentinel — Human

Confidence

The text reads like human-written feature journalism that skillfully blends financial reporting with expert, critical opinion, showing no immediate signs of machine generation.

Signals Detected
low severity: Erratic sentence length and rhythm; natural incorporation of direct quotes and conversational flow.
low severity: Organic flow between biographical details, funding facts, and philosophical skepticism; not overly polished or uniformly balanced.
low severity: The argument shifts from pure fact (fund details) to opinion (skepticism) naturally, consistent with journalistic feature writing.
low severity: Specific, complex relationships (e.g., Mayne's career path, specific VC backgrounds) suggest grounded, non-generative sourcing.
Human Indicators
The presence of nuanced, sometimes contrarian, skepticism from the founders about mainstream AI trends is a hallmark of human expert commentary, not typical LLM synthesis.
The inclusion of specific, verifiable personal histories (e.g., former roles at OpenAI, founding roles at other companies) anchors the narrative in specific, non-generic details.
The transition between financial reporting and philosophical critique is handled conversationally, lacking the mechanical transition structures often found in synthetic text.
OpenAI alums have been quietly investing from a new, potentially $100M fund — Arc Codex