Ashton Kutcher leaving Sound Ventures to launch new VC firm with Morgan Beller

Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures – the company he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago – to start a separate venture capital fund, the Wall Street Journal reported. TechCrunch had separately heard that Kutcher was preparing to leave; the WSJ’s report confirms this and adds new details to his plans for Beller.

The actor and investor’s new company is being co-founded with Morgan Beller – the name has not yet been made public – who was until recently a general partner at seed-focused VC outfit NFX and previously co-led cryptocurrency project Libra at Meta. Beller also was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz for nearly three years.

Kutcher’s departure doesn’t seem like a sign of trouble at Sound Ventures; Investors are more likely to exit companies that are underperforming, and that is not the case here. The company, which has backed companies like 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 where the AI ​​money is going: Sound built its reputation on concentrated, high-conviction bets in leading AI labs, while Kutcher’s new fund appears to be chasing the layer beneath those companies: the infrastructure and the energy that powers them.

“He and his fund are consistently successful [my] rankings of top unicorn investors. An interesting case!” Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks the best-performing venture capital funds, wrote on X.

The actor has known OpenAI’s Sam Altman since Altman founded Loopt – years before the launch of the ChatGPT maker.

Kutcher’s departure was partly due to differing views on the seed stages at which investments should be targeted, with Sound focusing on backing companies that are already more established, rather than betting on very early-stage startups, according to WSJ.

Kutcher and Beller focus on making early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy and deep tech startups – startups built around breakthroughs in hard science and engineering rather than software alone.

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.