The Insiders’ Club: OpenAI Alums Launch a Hundred-Million Dollar AI Fund
A group of former OpenAI heavy hitters just teamed up to start their own venture capital firm. They are calling it Zero Shot, a name that plays on a popular term in AI training. The firm is already making waves by quietly raising what could become a $100 million fund. These aren’t just random investors with deep pockets. The founding team includes people who were in the room when tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E were first built. Because they know exactly how the technology works from the inside, they believe they have a massive advantage over traditional VCs.
The team behind Zero Shot is a mix of engineering talent and business experience. Evan Morikawa, who led applied engineering for ChatGPT, is one of the key partners. He is joined by Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s former prompt engineer and the voice behind their official podcast. Mayne even started his own consulting firm, Interdimensional, before jumping into the venture world. Another founder, Shawn Jain, brings his experience as a founder of other startups like Synthetly. They also brought in Kelly Swartz from the growth stage firm 01A to help manage the money.
The transition from builders to investors happened almost by accident. After leaving OpenAI, these founders found themselves constantly giving advice to friends who were starting their own companies. They realized that instead of just helping for free, they could pool their resources and create a fund that actually understands the technical side of the startups they back. They have already closed the first $20 million of their fund and have started writing checks. One of their first bets is on Workspace AI, a platform that helps companies automate their tax management. They also put money into Foundry Robotics, a startup working on the next generation of AI-enhanced factory robots.
Zero Shot is also very vocal about what they won’t invest in. Because they understand the core models so well, they can spot a “thin” startup from a mile away. Andrew Mayne is skeptical of most AI coding tools. He thinks the big companies that build the models will eventually build those features themselves, making most startups in that space unnecessary. Evan Morikawa is equally cold on video data companies. He believes that many researchers are just hoping for a miracle to make video data useful for robotics, but that the tech is nowhere near ready for prime time. They even used their own AI reasoning models to test some “digital twins” startups and found that regular models could do the job just as well.
This insider knowledge is their secret weapon. They know that predicting where these models are going is extremely difficult because progress isn’t a straight line. To help them navigate this, they have recruited a group of big-name advisors from the tech world. This includes Diane Yoon, the former head of people at OpenAI, and Steve Dowling, who led communications at both Apple and OpenAI. These advisors get a share of the profits in exchange for their help in picking winners.
Zero Shot represents a new breed of venture capital. They aren’t interested in the hype or the corporate buzzwords. They want to find the founders who are solving real, difficult problems that the big AI labs haven’t touched yet. By focusing on the “empty spots” in the market, they hope to build an empire that lasts much longer than the current AI bubble. For now, the team is working quietly, picking their spots and using their deep technical roots to find the future of the industry.
