The people who built the models are now funding what comes next.
National Today’s April 6 report describes the launch of Zero Shot, a $100 million venture capital fund founded by former OpenAI employees and focused on early-stage AI startups. According to that report, the fund’s founding partners are Evan Morikawa, Andrew Mayne, and Shawn Jain. All claims in this brief carry single-source attribution, the National Today article is the only confirmed source in the current package, and no secondary confirmation was available at publication time.
The fund’s reported size, $100 million, positions it in the early-stage tier. For context, $100 million is enough to lead or co-lead seed and Series A rounds across approximately 15–25 companies at typical check sizes, depending on stage and deployment pace. It’s a meaningful fund, not a mega-fund. The thesis, per the same report, involves backing companies building AI-powered management software and next-generation factory robotics, two sectors where practical AI deployment is measurably further along than many consumer-facing applications.
The more significant signal may be the founding team’s origin. Former OpenAI engineers starting a venture fund is consistent with a pattern that’s been visible for roughly two years: alumni of frontier AI labs are increasingly moving into capital deployment rather than company formation. The distinction matters. When former engineers start companies, they’re making a direct technical bet. When they start funds, they’re making a bet on a category, and they’re doing it with a particular kind of pattern recognition that generalist VCs don’t have. They know which technical problems are actually hard. They’ve seen which research directions are dead ends. That information asymmetry is what Zero Shot is, presumably, selling to its limited partners.
The factory robotics focus is worth noting specifically. Autonomous vehicle funding dominated much of the physical AI investment conversation in 2025. Factory robotics, applying AI to industrial automation, logistics, and manufacturing floor processes, is the adjacent category with substantial enterprise demand and fewer of the regulatory surface area challenges that slowed AV deployment. A fund with founding partners who understand the model-level constraints is unusually well-positioned to evaluate whether robotics companies are making real technical progress or running marketing-assisted demos.
One important caveat: this brief rests on a single T3 source. The $100 million fund size, the founder names, and the investment focus areas all come exclusively from National Today’s coverage. A fund of this size would typically generate a press release, coverage in outlets like TechCrunch or Forbes, and eventually an SEC Form D filing. None of those were available in the current source package. Readers should treat all specifics here as reported pending that corroboration.
Watch for: SEC Form D filing from Zero Shot Capital (or the fund’s formal legal entity name) as the primary verification step. Watch for follow-on coverage in technology and venture press, and for first portfolio company announcements as signals of the fund’s actual thesis in action.
The Zero Shot launch is a micro-signal within a larger pattern. Q1 2026 saw record venture capital flow into AI. Some of that capital is being deployed by people who built the technology those capital flows are funding. The loop is getting shorter.