HomeOpenAI Co-Founders Launch Zero Shot Fund, Seek $100M with $20M First Round
Zero Shot, a venture capital fund launched by former OpenAI senior members, has closed its initial fundraising round, securing $20 million with a long-term target of $100 million. The fund was founded by Evan Morikawa, OpenAI’s former head of applied engineering; Andrew Mayne, the company’s first prompt engineer; and Shawn Jain, a former researcher. It has also attracted experienced venture capitalist Kelly Kovacs and cross-industry executive Brett Rounsaville as partners.
Zero Shot’s core advantage lies in its founding team’s deep involvement in building and deploying groundbreaking products like DALL·E and ChatGPT during OpenAI’s most critical growth period. This firsthand experience gives them a clear understanding of AI’s nonlinear development trajectory and the ability to separate real market demand from investment hype. The fund has already begun early-stage investing, including Worktrace AI, an automated management platform founded by former OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang (which raised $10 million in seed funding), and Foundry Robotics, which focuses on AI-enhanced factory robots.
Zero Shot’s investment strategy reflects strong technological defensiveness. The team is openly skeptical of most “vibe-coding” iterative projects and embodied intelligence startups that rely solely on ergonomic video data. They believe that as underlying model capabilities evolve, many middle-layer applications will lose their value, and conventional large language models already demonstrate inference performance sufficient to challenge vertical startups in specific fields like digital twins.
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Zero Shot, a venture capital fund launched by former OpenAI senior members, has closed its initial fundraising round, securing $20 million with a long-term target of $100 million. The fund was founded by Evan Morikawa, OpenAI’s former head of applied engineering; Andrew Mayne, the company’s first prompt engineer; and Shawn Jain, a former researcher. It has also attracted experienced venture capitalist Kelly Kovacs and cross-industry executive Brett Rounsaville as partners.
Zero Shot’s core advantage lies in its founding team’s deep involvement in building and deploying groundbreaking products like DALL·E and ChatGPT during OpenAI’s most critical growth period. This firsthand experience gives them a clear understanding of AI’s nonlinear development trajectory and the ability to separate real market demand from investment hype. The fund has already begun early-stage investing, including Worktrace AI, an automated management platform founded by former OpenAI product manager Angela Jiang (which raised $10 million in seed funding), and Foundry Robotics, which focuses on AI-enhanced factory robots.
Zero Shot’s investment strategy reflects strong technological defensiveness. The team is openly skeptical of most “vibe-coding” iterative projects and embodied intelligence startups that rely solely on ergonomic video data. They believe that as underlying model capabilities evolve, many middle-layer applications will lose their value, and conventional large language models already demonstrate inference performance sufficient to challenge vertical startups in specific fields like digital twins.
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Tencent Huan Yuan launched the preview of Image 3.5 (Hy Image3.5preview) on September 22, delivering substantial upgrades in image quality, layout precision, and photo editing while drastically cutting costs under the tagline "affordable and accessib
China Replaces All K-12 Textbooks, Lowers Difficulty and Integrates AI into Classrooms
This week marks the official start of the autumn semester for primary and secondary schools nationwide, bringing a series of new adjustments to compulsory education. Textbooks for three core subjects, previously piloted in phases starting in autumn 2
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