Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures — the company he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago — to launch a separate VC fund, The Wall Street Journal was mentioned. The actor and investor’s new company is co-founded by Morgan Beller, who until recently was a general partner at seed-focused VC outfit NFX and previously co-led the Libra cryptocurrency project at Meta. Beller also spent nearly three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
TechCrunch had heard separately that Kutcher was preparing to leave. The WSJ report confirms this and adds new details about his plans with Beller. The name of the new company has not yet been released.
Kutcher’s departure doesn’t appear to be a sign of trouble at Sound Ventures – investors often abandon underperforming companies, but that’s not the case here. The company, which has backed the likes of Brex and Gusto, was also an early investor in OpenAI, Anthropic and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs.
The split is also notable for what it signals about where AI money is headed: Sound built its reputation on concentrated, high-conviction bets on top-of-the-line AI labs, while Kutcher’s new fund appears to be chasing the layer beneath those companies — the infrastructure and energy that power them.
“He and his fund consistently succeed [my] ranking of top unicorn investors. An interesting case!” Stanford economics professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks top-performing VCs, wrote to X.
The actor has known OpenAI’s Sam Altman since Altman founded Loopt — years before the ChatGPT maker launched.
Kutcher’s departure was partly due to differing views on which stages of startups to target for investment, with Sound leaning toward backing companies that are already more established, rather than betting on very early-stage startups, according to the WSJ.
Kutcher and Beller focus on making early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep-tech startups—startups built around hard science and technology breakthroughs, not just software.
Despite leaving Sound Ventures, Kutcher will continue to serve as an advisor to the company. Meanwhile, Oseary and Sound general partner Effie Epstein will advise Kutcher and Beller’s new company.
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