OpenAI Early Employees Establish $100 Million VC Fund Zero Shot, Bearish on Vibe Coding and Robot Video Data

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, three early employees of OpenAI have teamed up with two industry professionals to establish a venture capital fund named Zero Shot, targeting a size of $100 million. The first closing has already raised $20 million and several investments have been completed. The fund’s name is derived from the AI term ‘zero-shot learning.’ The three co-founding partners from OpenAI are: Evan Morikawa, former head of application engineering at OpenAI, who experienced the release cycles of DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Codex, and is now with the robotics startup Generalist; Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s first prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI Podcast, who founded the AI deployment consulting firm Interdimensional; and Shawn Jain, a former researcher at OpenAI who transitioned to venture capital and founded the GenAI company Synthefy. The other two partners are Kelly Kovacs, founding partner of the growth fund 01A under former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, and Brett Rounsaville, who has worked at Twitter and Disney. Invested projects include Worktrace AI, an enterprise automation platform founded by former OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang (seed round of about $10 million, with investors including Mira Murati and OpenAI’s own fund), and Foundry Robotics, an AI factory robotics company (seed round of $13.5 million, led by Khosla Ventures), with a third project still in stealth mode. It may be more interesting to note what they choose not to invest in. Mayne has explicitly expressed skepticism towards most vibe coding platforms, arguing that advancements in programming capabilities by model vendors will soon render these platforms’ paid subscriptions unnecessary. Morikawa is not optimistic about the current surge of ‘robot video training data’ companies, stating that the research community has yet to solve the transfer gap from video to physical entities, and that ‘many companies are betting that the research community will solve this issue, but we are far from achieving that.’ Mayne also holds a skeptical view towards ‘digital twin’ startups, having conducted due diligence and built a reasoning model to test, concluding that the performance of ordinary large language models is roughly the same. The fund’s advisory board includes Diane Yoon, former head of HR at OpenAI; Steve Dowling, former head of communications (also a former communications head at Apple); and Luke Miller, former head of product.