OpenAI graduates have been quietly investing in a new fund potentially worth $100 million.

A new venture capital fund with close ties to OpenAI has met its $100 million goal for the first time, its founders tell TechCrunch. My partner has already written some checks.

The fund is called Zero Shot (a play on AI education terminology), and its co-founding team includes several OpenAI OGs who became VCs almost by accident.

Three of the founding partners are from OpenAI. Evan Morikawa, who served as head of application engineering during the launch of DALL·E and ChatGPT through Codex, is now at the robotics startup Generalist. Andrew Mayne, OpenAI’s original prompt engineer, is best known as the host of The OpenAI podcast. Mayne also founded InterDimensional, an AI deployment consulting firm. and Shawn Jain, an engineer and former researcher at OpenAI who later became a VC and founder of his own GenAI startup, Synthefy.

The graduates are joined by VC Kelly Kovacs, who was previously a founding partner at 01A, a growth-stage venture firm founded by Dick Costello and Adam Bain. The fund’s fifth founding member is Brett Rounsaville, who previously worked at Twitter and Disney and is also CEO of Mayne’s InterDimensional.

The OpenAI alumni “have been friends for many years,” Mayne told TechCrunch. He saw his most rapid growth while working with Model Maker even before launching ChatGPT.

Since leaving, they’ve all been contacted constantly by VCs asking them to consult on emerging AI technologies and by founder friends asking for advice. That’s why Mayne started a consulting firm.

“Some of our friends were interested in coming out of OpenAI and doing entrepreneurship,” Mayne said.

Graduates saw a gap between the many AI startups being funded and what the market actually needed.

“We may have to self-fund it because we think we have a pretty good idea of ​​where things are headed and we have great access to people who we think are amazing builders,” Mayne said, recalling the decision.

After speaking with institutions and family offices and closing an initial $20 million, the partners targeted $100 million in seed funding. They’ve already written some checks.

Zero Shot initially supported OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang and her startup Worktrace AI. The startup is developing an AI-based management software platform to help businesses automate tasks by discovering first what needs to be automated. Worktrace AI has raised a $10 million seed round from big names like Mira Murati and OpenAI’s Fund, PitchBook estimates.

The team also invested in Foundry Robotics, a startup working on the next generation of AI-enhanced factory robotics. It recently raised $13.5 million in seed funding, led by Khosla Ventures. Zero Shot has already invested in a third startup, but it remains quiet.

Betting that the AI ​​is skipping

Zero Shot’s founders say they understand where AI is headed better than many VCs. This not only helps them select startups, but also helps them identify which ideas to avoid.

For example, Mayne was negative about most iterations of Vibe’s coding because he predicted that modelers with coding expertise would make subscriptions to these platforms unnecessarily fast.

Morikawa told TechCrunch that he is not a fan of current ergonomic video data companies in the robotics space because he has deep knowledge in AI and robotics. They are a startup working on embodied training data for robotics.

“There’s a lot of hope and prayer going on that someone in the research community will figure out how to transfer the implementation gap, but it’s almost impossible,” Morikawa said of these video data.

Mayne is equally skeptical of most startups doing “digital twins.” He said he did his due diligence on a few things, including building an inference model for testing, and concluded that a generic LLM model would also work well.

“There’s a real skill in knowing how to predict where these models will go next, because it’s not very clear. It’s not linear,” Morikawa said.

In addition to the investing founders, Zero Shot has several high-profile individuals who have agreed to become advisors and receive a portion of the “carried interest” the fund returns. Advisors include Diane Yun, former head of human resources at OpenAI; Steve Dowling, former head of communications at OpenAI and Apple; and Luke Miller, former product lead at OpenAI.