TL;DR
Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures to co-found a new early-stage firm with Morgan Beller focused on AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech.
Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to start a new venture capital firm with Morgan Beller, according to TechCrunch. The new firm will target early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, areas where Kutcher believes the next generation of transformative companies will be built.
The split is partly strategic. Sound Ventures has drifted toward later-stage deals over the years, while Kutcher wants to return to backing founders at the earliest stages. The new firm’s name has not been disclosed, and neither has its fund size.
Beller brings a resume that spans some of the most prominent names in technology and venture capital. She co-led the creation of Libra, Meta’s cryptocurrency project that was later renamed Diem and eventually shut down. She then spent roughly three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz before joining NFX as a general partner.
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Kutcher’s track record as a technology investor has long outpaced his Hollywood reputation. Sound Ventures backed OpenAI and Anthropic before either company became a household name, alongside Brex, Gusto, and World Labs, the AI company founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li. Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev praised Kutcher’s investing record on X after the news broke, calling it one of the strongest in venture capital over the past decade.
The departure is amicable, at least on paper. Kutcher will continue to advise Sound Ventures, while Oseary and Effie Epstein, Sound’s third general partner, will serve as advisers to the new firm. Sound Ventures manages more than one billion dollars in assets and will continue operating under Oseary’s leadership.
The timing puts Kutcher and Beller in a crowded field. Founders Fund just closed a six billion dollar growth fund focused on AI and defence technology, Accel raised five billion dollars for late-stage AI bets, and Eclipse closed over one billion dollars for early-stage deep tech and physical industries. The first quarter of 2026 saw a record 297 billion dollars flow into startups globally.
What distinguishes the new firm, at least in theory, is the combination of early-stage focus and sector specificity. Most of the mega-funds competing for AI deals are writing hundred-million-dollar checks into companies that have already proven product-market fit. Kutcher and Beller are betting that the better opportunity is upstream, backing the infrastructure and energy companies that those later-stage AI giants will depend on, though whether a firm without a public name or disclosed fund size can compete against established deep tech investors remains the open question.
