OpenAI Veterans Launch Zero Shot Fund, Targeting $100 Million for AI Startups

Three former OpenAI employees who helped ship DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Codex have closed their first round of capital for a new $100 million venture fund, positioning some of the AI industry's most deeply networked insiders as early-stage backers in the sectors their former employer is racing to dominate.

The fund, called Zero Shot, is headquartered in San Francisco and run by five co-founding partners. The name references the machine learning concept of zero-shot learning: a model's capacity to handle tasks it was never explicitly trained on. The founders described their arrival in venture capital as coming "almost by serendipity," a candid framing that underscores how OpenAI's alumni network has grown large enough to generate its own institutional gravity.

Evan Morikawa, who served as head of applied engineering at OpenAI during the concurrent launches of DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Codex, anchors the fund's technical credentials. He is also currently affiliated with Generalist, a robotics startup. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI's original prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI podcast, co-founded AI deployment consultancy Interdimensional. Shawn Jain, a former OpenAI engineer and researcher, brings both sides of the table: he previously founded the generative AI startup Synthefy before transitioning to VC.

The two non-OpenAI partners extend the network in different directions. Kelly Kovacs came from 01A, the growth-stage VC firm built by former Twitter CEO Dick Costello and former Twitter COO Adam Bain. Brett Rounsaville, whose career spans both Twitter and Disney, serves as CEO of Interdimensional alongside his role as a Zero Shot partner.

Zero Shot is targeting what it calls "the post-AGI world," with stated investment focus areas across robotics, energy, automation, education, AI security, and biology. The scope signals a belief that AI's next phase won't be confined to software. Robotics, energy infrastructure, and biological sciences each carry physical constraints and regulatory complexity that software-native investors have historically underweighted.

But the fund's structure also raises accountability questions that come with any insider-to-investor transition at this scale. Former OpenAI employees carry institutional knowledge: which research directions were showing promise, which technical architectures were quietly deprioritized, which startup founders emerged from the company's own ranks. That pattern recognition can produce meaningful investment advantages over outside observers. Several Zero Shot partners also maintain active operational roles at companies in adjacent spaces, Morikawa at Generalist and both Mayne and Rounsaville at Interdimensional, creating potential information flows between investor and operator that the fund has not addressed publicly.

Zero Shot's emergence fits a documented pattern of OpenAI alumni deploying both companies and capital. The broader diaspora has produced at least 18 notable startups, including Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI researchers Dario and Daniela Amodei and now valued at $170 billion, and Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and valued at $12 billion. AI companies built by OpenAI and DeepMind alumni have been noted for reaching nine-figure annual recurring revenue. Peter Deng, another OpenAI veteran, made the investor transition more formally by joining Felicis Ventures as a general partner.

Zero Shot's first close on $100 million suggests limited partners see value in that network proximity. Whether founders outside the OpenAI orbit will receive equal access to its attention is the question the fund's track record will eventually have to answer.