Ashton Kutcher is stepping away from Sound Ventures to launch a new venture capital firm with Morgan Beller, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
The actor and investor co-founded the original firm 11 years ago with Guy Oseary. Beller joins Kutcher after serving as a general partner at seed-focused outfit NFX and previously co-leading the cryptocurrency project Libra at Meta. She also spent nearly three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. The name of the new fund has not been announced.
Context for the move
TechCrunch had reported earlier that Kutcher was preparing to leave. The WSJ story confirms those reports and adds detail on his plans with Beller.
Kutcher’s exit does not indicate trouble at Sound Ventures. Investors often depart firms that are underperforming, but that is not the case here. The firm has backed companies like Brex and Gusto. It was also an early investor in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs.
The split highlights where AI money is heading next. Sound built its reputation on concentrated, high-conviction bets in category-leading AI labs. Kutcher’s new fund appears to be chasing the layer underneath those companies — the infrastructure and energy that power them.
Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks top-performing VCs, wrote on X that Kutcher and his fund consistently make it onto his rankings of top unicorn investors. He described the situation as an interesting case.
Kutcher has known OpenAI’s Sam Altman since Altman founded Loopt, years before the launch of the ChatGPT maker.
The departure was partly due to different views on which startup stages to target for investments. Sound leaned toward backing companies that are already more established. Kutcher prefers betting on very early-stage startups, according to the WSJ.
Kutcher and Beller are focused on making early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech startups. These are startups built around hard science and engineering breakthroughs rather than software alone.
Despite leaving Sound Ventures, Kutcher will continue to serve as an adviser to the firm. Meanwhile, Oseary and Sound general partner Effie Epstein will advise Kutcher and Beller’s new firm.
What it means
For people building AI tools, this shift suggests capital is moving toward the physical and computational foundations required to run large models. Funds are now prioritising the energy systems and hardware infrastructure that allow those models to operate, rather than just the software applications themselves.
