Zero Shot, a new venture capital fund founded by several senior members of OpenAI, recently announced that it has completed its first round of fundraising with a target of 20 million USD, with the final goal set at 100 million USD. The fund was initiated by Evan Morikawa, former head of applied engineering at OpenAI, Andrew Mayne, the first prompt engineer, and Shawn Jain, a former researcher, and has attracted experienced venture capitalist Kelly Kovacs and cross-industry executive Brett Rounsaville as partners.
Zero Shot's core competitiveness lies in the deep involvement of its founding team in the development and deployment of groundbreaking products such as DALL·E and ChatGPT, experiencing the most critical growth period of OpenAI. This background allows them to understand the nonlinear trajectory of AI technology development and identify the gap between real market demand and investment bubbles. Currently, the fund has begun early-stage investments, including the automated management platform Worktrace AI, founded by Angela Jiang, former product manager at OpenAI (the company has raised 10 million USD in seed funding), and Foundry Robotics, which focuses on AI-enhanced factory robots.
In terms of investment strategy, Zero Shot shows strong technological defensiveness. The team clearly expresses skepticism toward most "Vibe decoding" iterative projects and embodied intelligence startups that solely rely on ergonomic video data. Partners believe that as the capabilities of underlying models evolve, many middle-layer applications will lose their value, and conventional large language models have already demonstrated inference performance sufficient to challenge vertical startups in specific fields such as digital twins.
