- Zero Shot, co-founded by five partners including three former OpenAI employees, completed a first close of $20 million toward a $100 million fund target, per TechCrunch.
- The fund has backed Worktrace AI, which raised a $10 million seed, and Foundry Robotics, which closed a $13.5 million seed led by Khosla Ventures.
- Co-founder Evan Morikawa called the embodiment gap transfer in robotics video data “nowhere near possible,” signaling the fund’s skepticism toward that category.
- Advisors include Diane Yoon, OpenAI’s former head of people, and Steve Dowling, former head of communications at both OpenAI and Apple.
What Happened
A new venture capital fund called Zero Shot disclosed to TechCrunch on April 6, 2026 that it has completed a first close of $20 million toward a targeted $100 million inaugural fund. Its five founding partners include three former OpenAI employees and have already deployed capital into at least two disclosed startups and one still-unnamed company operating in stealth.
The fund’s name references the AI training concept of zero-shot inference. Its founding team comprises Evan Morikawa, former head of applied engineering at OpenAI during the launches of DALL·E, ChatGPT, and Codex, who is now at robotics startup Generalist; Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI Podcast, who also founded AI deployment consultancy Interdimensional; and Shawn Jain, a former OpenAI researcher and engineer who has since become both a VC and the founder of GenAI startup Synthefy. They are joined by Kelly Kovacs, previously a founding partner at growth-stage firm 01A, and Brett Rounsaville, formerly of Twitter and Disney, who serves as CEO of Interdimensional.
Why It Matters
Zero Shot’s launch reflects a broader trend of former frontier AI lab employees moving into capital deployment roles, a dynamic that has accelerated since OpenAI’s rapid growth following ChatGPT’s November 2022 release. The fund is positioning deep operational familiarity with model development cycles as a sourcing and diligence advantage over generalist venture investors.
“Maybe we should do our own fund, because we think we have a pretty good sense of where things are headed, and we have this great access to people who we think are incredible builders,” Mayne told TechCrunch, describing the founding rationale. The team secured initial commitments from institutions and family offices before publicly disclosing the vehicle.
Technical Details
Zero Shot’s disclosed investments concentrate on enterprise automation and physical AI. The fund backed Worktrace AI, founded by Angela Jiang, an early OpenAI product manager. Worktrace AI’s platform identifies enterprise workflows that are candidates for automation before executing on them; it raised a $10 million seed round from investors including Mira Murati and the OpenAI Fund, according to PitchBook estimates. The fund also invested in Foundry Robotics, which is building AI-enhanced factory robotics and recently closed a $13.5 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures.
The founding partners articulated specific thesis boundaries around categories they are avoiding. Morikawa said he is skeptical of what he called “ergo-centric video data companies in robotics” — startups collecting embodiment training data premised on future research closing the robot control gap. “There’s a lot of hoping and praying going on right now that someone in the research world will figure out how to transfer the embodiment gap,” Morikawa told TechCrunch, stating that such a transfer is “nowhere near possible.” Separately, Mayne said he built a reasoning model to evaluate several digital twins startups during due diligence and found that a standard LLM performs comparably, undermining those companies’ core value propositions. Mayne also expressed bearishness toward most vibe coding platforms, citing the likelihood that model providers with coding expertise will commoditize the category through subscriptions.
Who’s Affected
Early-stage AI founders seeking capital from investors with direct technical experience at a frontier model lab are Zero Shot’s stated target cohort. The fund’s existing portfolio — enterprise workflow automation and industrial robotics — indicates a preference for applied AI with measurable commercial use cases over foundational model development, where the fund’s general partners would be competing against their former employer.
The fund’s advisory roster extends its reach deeper into the OpenAI alumni network. Advisors holding a carried interest stake include Diane Yoon, OpenAI’s former head of people; Steve Dowling, former communications lead at both OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, a former product leader at OpenAI. Established early-stage investors in applied AI will encounter additional sourcing competition from this cohort.
What’s Next
Zero Shot is continuing to raise toward the $100 million target; no timeline for the final close was provided. A third portfolio company currently operating in stealth is expected to be disclosed at a later date. “There is a real skill in knowing how to predict where these models will be going next, because it’s extremely not obvious. It’s not linear,” Morikawa told TechCrunch, framing the fund’s selection logic around anticipating model capability trajectories rather than extrapolating from current benchmarks.
