NextFin News - A group of OpenAI’s earliest employees has transitioned from building the world’s most famous large language models to financing the next generation of "post-AGI" infrastructure. Zero Shot, a new venture capital firm founded by a cohort of OpenAI veterans, has reached its first close on a $100 million target, the partners confirmed on Monday. The fund represents a formalization of the "OpenAI Mafia," a growing network of former employees who are leveraging their proximity to the frontier of artificial intelligence to identify gaps in a market they believe is currently saturated with redundant software layers.
The founding team includes Evan Morikawa, who led applied engineering for ChatGPT and DALL-E; Andrew Mayne, the organization’s first prompt engineer and host of its official podcast; and Shawn Jain, a former OpenAI researcher turned entrepreneur. They are joined by Kelly Kovacs, a founding partner at 01A, and Brett Rounsaville, a former Disney and Twitter executive. According to Mayne, the fund was born out of "serendipity" after the group found themselves inundated with requests from venture firms and former colleagues seeking technical due diligence on a wave of generative AI startups that often lacked fundamental moats.
Zero Shot has already deployed capital into three ventures, including Worktrace AI, a startup founded by former OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang. Worktrace, which recently raised a $10 million seed round with participation from OpenAI’s own startup fund and former CTO Mira Murati, focuses on "process discovery"—using AI to observe enterprise workflows and identify which tasks are ripe for automation. The fund also backed Foundry Robotics, a Khosla Ventures-led startup developing AI-enhanced factory systems, and a third company currently operating in stealth. These bets signal a shift away from "wrapper" startups—companies that merely build interfaces on top of existing models—toward capital-intensive hardware and deep-integration enterprise tools.
The emergence of Zero Shot highlights a growing skepticism among AI insiders regarding the current venture landscape. Mayne has expressed a bearish outlook on many popular AI categories, particularly those focused on basic content generation or simple chatbot interfaces. This perspective is not yet a consensus on Wall Street, where many large-cap investors continue to pour billions into application-layer startups. However, the Zero Shot partners argue that their experience at the "ground zero" of the LLM revolution gives them a unique vantage point to see which technologies will be rendered obsolete by future model updates from OpenAI or Google.
While the "alumni fund" model has been successful for former employees of PayPal and Google, Zero Shot faces the challenge of a crowded and expensive private market. The fund’s $100 million target is modest compared to the multi-billion dollar vehicles raised by established firms like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia. Furthermore, the reliance on a "post-AGI" thesis assumes a specific trajectory for AI development that may be delayed by technical bottlenecks or regulatory hurdles. For now, the fund’s primary value proposition remains its "insider" status, offering founders not just capital, but the technical pedigree of the team that helped spark the current boom.
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