OpenAI alums have been quietly investing from a new, potentially $100M fund
Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
The capital of the new venture capital fund Zero Shot, founded by former OpenAI employees, is ultimately expected to reach one hundred million dollars. A group of industry veterans, referred to as "OpenAI OGs," has decided to formalize their previous occasional startup investments and create a structure to support a new wave of innovation. The fund has already announced its first closing and has issued its first checks, as confirmed by the founders in an interview with TechCrunch. The project's name directly refers to the term "zero-shot learning," which signifies an AI model's ability to recognize objects or concepts it has not previously encountered during training. For the global technology ecosystem, the emergence of Zero Shot signals that the capital and expertise developed within the world's most powerful AI laboratory are beginning to circulate more widely. Users and creators can expect a surge of new tools built by teams that will receive not only funding but, above all, unique mentoring from people who helped co-create the foundations of modern Large Language Models. This initiative will accelerate the commercialization of niche solutions in the field of generative artificial intelligence that have so far remained in the experimental phase. Instead of waiting for updates from the giants, the market will receive an injection of innovation from smaller, more agile players backed by industry insiders.
Silicon Valley is currently undergoing a fascinating process of redefining venture capital, where engineering expertise is becoming more valuable than years spent in investment banking. The latest evidence for this thesis is the emergence of Zero Shot — a new venture capital fund that, while operating in the shadow of giants, possesses intellectual capital straight from the front lines of the AI revolution. Behind the project are OpenAI veterans who, instead of building more language models, have decided to finance the next wave of innovation with an amount of approximately $100 million.
The name of the fund is no coincidence and serves as a clear signal to the industry. The term zero-shot refers to an AI model's ability to perform a task it hasn't "seen" before during the training process, relying only on general knowledge. This is a perfect metaphor for the strategy of the fund, which seeks projects that break existing paradigms rather than just replicating current automation patterns. The creators of Zero Shot, referred to as "OpenAI OGs" (Original Gangsters), are individuals who helped build the foundations of today's artificial intelligence market before it became a mainstream part of the global economy.
Architects of OpenAI's success enter the investment game
The Zero Shot fund has just announced the first closing of its funding round, moving closer to its ambitious $100 million goal. As reported by TechCrunch, the managing partners are not waiting to raise the full amount — the first checks have already been issued, and capital has begun flowing to startups that the founders believe have "game-changer" potential. What distinguishes Zero Shot from traditional players on Sand Hill Road is its unique operational perspective. The fund's founders have gone through all stages of scaling OpenAI, from a niche research lab to a global leader valued at tens of billions of dollars.
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The transition from roles as engineers and product managers to investors occurred, according to the individuals involved, almost by accident. In a tech world where capital seeks access to the best minds, former OpenAI employees naturally became advisors and business angels for new entrepreneurs. Formalizing this activity under the Zero Shot banner is a logical step in the evolution of the "OpenAI mafia" — a group of influential people who, after leaving their parent company, create their own powerhouses, similar to the famous "PayPal mafia" of the early 2000s.
A $100 million strategy for a new era of AI
An amount of $100 million in the context of venture capital funds may seem modest compared to the billion-dollar budgets of giants like Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz. However, in the early-stage segment, such capital allows for taking significant stakes in the most promising technology companies. Zero Shot targets investments where understanding the technical nuances of transformer architecture or model weight optimization is crucial for assessing a startup's potential. Investors without a technical background often fall for marketing hype, while OpenAI veterans can look "under the hood" of the algorithms.
The fund's key advantages include:
- Deep technical knowledge: The ability to verify the claims of AI startups at the code and data architecture level.
- Network of contacts at OpenAI and Anthropic: Direct access to key talent and information on the development directions of the largest models.
- Scaling experience: Knowledge of how to manage massive computational infrastructure costs, which is the biggest barrier to entry in the AI industry.
- Brand recognition: Startups are more likely to accept capital from people who actually built products like GPT-4.
Capital that understands algorithms
Currently, the AI market is in a phase of correcting expectations against actual capabilities. Many VC funds that aggressively invested in "everything with an .ai suffix" in previous years are now pulling back or remaining very cautious. In this landscape, Zero Shot positions itself as a substantive investor. The fund's partners know that true value lies not in building more wrappers for OpenAI APIs, but in creating proprietary solutions that solve specific vertical problems — from biotechnology to advanced robotics.
Investing by former employees into companies that may in the future become partners or competitors of their former employer creates an interesting market dynamic. OpenAI has ceased to be just a company; it has become a talent incubator fueling the entire industry. The emergence of a fund with such strong ties to the creators of ChatGPT suggests an internal industry belief in the upcoming decentralization of AI power. Instead of a single, monolithic model, the future may belong to a distributed ecosystem of specialized agents, the development of which Zero Shot will finance.
"Our approach does not stem from a desire to be financiers, but from a need to support technologies that we ourselves would want to build" — this approach seems to dominate the fund's philosophy.
The appearance of Zero Shot is a signal that control over the direction of artificial intelligence development is shifting from the hands of traditional corporations toward smaller, more agile groups of experts. A fund with a $100 million goal may not change the entire market overnight, but it will certainly become an incubator for technologies that will define work and communication standards in 2-3 years. In a world where every second of model training costs a fortune, having an investor who understands these costs and can optimize them is more valuable to startups than the bank transfer itself. Zero Shot not only fills a capital gap but, above all, builds a bridge between pure science and the brutal business reality of Silicon Valley.
