A group of former OpenAI employees have transformed from technology builders to investors, with the launch of a new venture capital fund called Zero Shot, with a target scale of up to 100 million USD.
This fund has just completed the first funding round, raising about 20 million USD from organizations and family offices, and at the same time starting to implement some initial investments.
According to the founders, they expect to quickly increase the total size of the fund to 100 million USD in the near future.
The founding team of Zero Shot includes many faces who used to play important roles at OpenAI. Notable are Evan Morikawa, who participated in developing products such as DALL·E and ChatGPT; Andrew Mayne, one of the first "prompt" engineers; along with Shawn Jain, an AI researcher who later switched to investing.
They also partnered with Kelly Kovacs, former venture capital fund partner 01A (headquartered in the US, specializing in investing in growth-fueled technology companies) and Brett Rounsaville, who used to work at Twitter and Disney.
The common point of the group is that they have collaborated for many years in the explosive development phase of OpenAI before and after ChatGPT was launched.
According to Andrew Mayne, after leaving OpenAI, they are often sought after by startups and investors to ask for advice on AI.
This helps them realize a large gap in the market when many AI companies are capitalized, but not all solve the real needs.
Taking advantage of deep experience in the field of artificial intelligence, Zero Shot focuses on investing in startups with high practical application capabilities.
One of the first investments is Worktrace AI, which is a platform to help businesses identify and automate tasks using AI.
The fund also invested in Foundry Robotics, a company developing new generation factory robots.
Notably, the founders of Zero Shot not only chose potential fields but also actively avoided trends they considered "bubbles".
Andrew Mayne expressed skepticism about "emotional encryption" platforms, saying that large AI models will quickly make them obsolete.
Meanwhile, Evan Morikawa underestimates startups that rely on video data to train robots, saying that converting this data into actual mobility is almost impossible.
The difference of Zero Shot lies in the fact that the founders have directly built advanced AI models.
They understand the pace of technological development and can predict trends, although admitting that this is "not linear and very difficult to predict".
In addition to the founding team, the fund also has the advisory participation of many former leaders of OpenAI and Apple, helping to expand the network and improve project evaluation capabilities.
In the context of AI becoming the focus of global investment, the emergence of Zero Shot shows a new trend when people who once created technology are now returning to select the next generation of startups.
Their success will depend not only on capital, but also on their ability to see the right direction in a rapidly developing market.
