Early OpenAI employees establish a $100 million VC fund Zero Shot, bearish on vibe coding and robot video data

According to monitoring by 1M AI News, three early OpenAI employees, together with two industry insiders, have launched a risk investment fund called Zero Shot, aiming for a target size of $100 million. The first round has already closed with $20 million raised, and several investments have been completed. The fund’s name comes from the AI term “zero-shot learning.”

The three OpenAI co-founding partners are: Evan Morikawa, former OpenAI head of application engineering, who has gone through the release cycles from DALL·E to ChatGPT to Codex, and now works at the robotics startup Generalist; Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s first prompt engineer, and also host of The OpenAI Podcast, who founded an AI deployment consultancy called Interdimensional; Shawn Jain, former OpenAI researcher, who later switched to VC and founded the GenAI company Synthefy. The other two partners are Kelly Kovacs, a founding partner of the growth-stage fund 01A, which is under the leadership of 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 a fund under OpenAI), and Foundry Robotics, an AI factory robotics company (seed round of $13.5 million, with Khosla Ventures leading the investment). The third project is still in stealth mode.

Compared with what they invest in, what they don’t invest in may be more interesting. Mayne is openly bearish on most “vibe coding” platforms, arguing that as model vendors make rapid progress in their own programming capabilities, paid subscriptions for these platforms will soon become unnecessary. Morikawa is not optimistic about the current wave of “robot video training data” companies, saying that the research community still cannot solve the transfer gap from video to physical reality. “Right now, there are a lot of companies betting that someone in the research community will solve this problem, but it’s still a long way from being realized.” Mayne is also skeptical about “digital twin” startups; he has conducted due diligence and built an inference model to test it, and the conclusion is that the results are roughly the same as with a typical large language model.

The advisory board includes Diane Yoon, former OpenAI head of human resources; Steve Dowling, former head of communications (who also served as head of communications at Apple); and Luke Miller, former head of product.