Ashton Kutcher Leaves Sound Ventures to Launch New Investment Fund

The End of One Chapter, the Beginning of a New Bet

After eleven years as a partner at Sound Ventures — the firm he co-founded alongside music producer Guy Oseary — actor and prominent investor Ashton Kutcher has decided to move on to a new chapter in his investment career. According to the Wall Street Journal, Kutcher is working to launch an independent venture capital fund in partnership with seasoned investor Morgan Beller.

Who Is Morgan Beller?

Morgan Beller brings an impressive résumé in the world of tech investing. She served as a General Partner at NFX, a fund specializing in early-stage investments, and before that led Meta's Libra digital currency project. She also spent nearly three years as a partner at the powerhouse firm Andreessen Horowitz. With this exceptional background, the Kutcher-Beller duo appears well-positioned to craft a differentiated investment thesis in an intensely competitive market.

Why Leave Sound Ventures?

Kutcher's departure does not reflect any issues with Sound Ventures' performance — the firm remains one of the most recognized names in venture capital. Its portfolio includes leading companies such as Brex and Gusto, and it was among the earliest investors in OpenAI, Anthropic, and World Labs, the research lab founded by AI scientist Fei-Fei Li.

The core difference lies in investment strategy: while Sound Ventures tends to favor more mature and established companies, Kutcher prefers to bet on businesses in their earliest stages, where the risks are higher but the potential returns are far greater.

What Will the New Fund Target?

Kutcher and Beller are focusing their efforts on specific investment categories, including:

• AI Infrastructure: The technical layer that powers and supports large AI models.
• Energy: The true fuel behind the AI revolution, which demands enormous amounts of power.
• Deep Tech: Companies built on genuine scientific and engineering breakthroughs, not software alone.

This direction reflects a sharp strategic read: while major funds race to invest in AI labs themselves, Kutcher is betting on the layer beneath them — the infrastructure, energy, and scientific research that makes those labs possible in the first place.

A Network Built Over Years: The Real Asset

Kutcher's connections in Silicon Valley are deep and wide-ranging. He has known OpenAI CEO Sam Altman since Altman founded his first company, Loopt, long before ChatGPT existed. Professor Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford University, who specializes in tracking the performance of top investors, has praised Kutcher as one of the most notable unicorn investors of recent years.

A Separation Without Severance

What stands out about this split is its collaborative nature. Kutcher will continue in an advisory role at Sound Ventures, while Oseary and General Partner Evi Epstein will serve as advisors to the new fund. The name of the new entity has yet to be revealed, but anticipation within venture capital circles is palpable — many are eager to see what bets this duo will place at a moment when the shape of artificial intelligence and its underlying infrastructure is being redefined from the ground up.

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