Zero Shot, a new venture capital fund composed mostly of ex-OpenAI alumni, has raised its first $20 million and begun investing. The team has already pointed out certain AI trends they think will not work out.
The fund gets its name from an AI training method where a model handles tasks it has not seen before. Three of the five founding partners are former OpenAI employees: Evan Morikawa, who led applied engineering for DALL·E, Codex, and ChatGPT and now works at Generalist; Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s first prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI podcast, who also started the AI consultancy Interdimensional; and Shawn Jain, a former OpenAI researcher and venture capitalist who later founded Synthefy.
The team also includes Kelly Kovacs, a founding partner at 01A, and Brett Rounsaville, who worked at Twitter and Disney and is now CEO of Interdimensional.
Zero Shot has invested in three companies: Worktrace AI, founded by Angela Jiang, an early product manager at OpenAI and Foundry Robotics, which builds AI factory robots and recently raised $13.5 million in a seed round led by Khosla Ventures.
The third company in their portfolio is still in stealth mode.
The fund’s advisors include Diane Yoon, who was head of people at OpenAI; Steve Dowling, who led communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, a former product leader at OpenAI.
Zero Shot is now working toward its $100 million goal after getting initial funding from institutions and family offices.
