Ashton Kutcher became world famous as an actor, and as an investor he has long been one of the most successful in Silicon Valley.
Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher is launching a new venture capital fund. After eleven years, the actor and investor is leaving the VC fund Sound Ventures, which he co-founded, and is founding a new investment company together with Morgan Beller. This is reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Beller was most recently general partner at seed investor NFX and previously worked at Meta on the crypto project Libra and as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Focus on AI infrastructure instead of AI models
The change is not considered a response to issues at Sound Ventures. On the contrary: the fund is one of the more successful investors in recent years and was involved early on in companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, World Labs, Brex and Gusto.
What is particularly exciting is the new investment focus: While Sound Ventures recently focused more on established AI companies, Kutcher wants to invest in a much earlier phase in the future – especially in AI infrastructure, energy and deep tech. This includes data centers, power supply or technologies that make the next generation of AI possible.
According to the Wall Street Journal, different ideas about the direction of the fund were one of the reasons for the split. Kutcher will remain an advisor to Sound Ventures, while the partners of both funds will support each other in the future.