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

Actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher is stepping away from Sound Ventures, the venture capital firm he helped build, to launch a new investment vehicle alongside co-founder Morgan Beller, according to a new report. The move marks a significant shakeup at one of Hollywood's most closely watched forays into technology investing.

The departure was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which laid out additional details of Kutcher's plans to team up with Beller on the fresh venture. TechCrunch noted it had independently picked up signals that Kutcher was preparing to depart before the Journal's story confirmed the move. As of now, the pair have not disclosed what the new firm will be called or when it will formally launch.

Sound Ventures built a notable track record during Kutcher's tenure, backing corporate-spending platform Brex and payroll software company Gusto among its portfolio bets. The firm also secured early positions in some of the most closely watched names in artificial intelligence, including OpenAI and Anthropic, along with Fei-Fei Li's newer venture, World Labs.

Executive departures from investment firms are frequently read as a warning sign, often surfacing when a fund has struggled to deliver returns or when internal disagreements boil over. That does not appear to be the story here. Sound Ventures' portfolio of AI heavyweights suggests the firm has been performing well, making Kutcher's exit look more like a strategic pivot than a retreat.

What makes the split noteworthy is less about Sound Ventures' standing and more about where it points the broader flow of AI capital. Sound made its name through selective, high-conviction wagers on the AI labs building category-defining foundation models. Kutcher's next venture, by contrast, appears to be aimed a level lower in the stack — at the infrastructure and energy systems that keep those AI labs running.

That shift mirrors a broader debate playing out across the venture industry. As foundation-model companies have grown enormously valuable and expensive to compete with directly, some investors have begun looking instead toward the picks-and-shovels side of the boom: chips, data centers, and the power generation needed to keep them online. If Kutcher and Beller are indeed steering their new fund toward that layer, it would place them alongside a growing cohort of investors betting that AI's next bottleneck — and next big return — lies in physical infrastructure rather than in the labs themselves.

Much about the new firm remains unconfirmed, including its name, its target fund size, and a firm launch date. It is also unclear whether Kutcher will retain any involvement with Sound Ventures' existing portfolio or step away entirely. For now, the reported plan positions Kutcher and Beller to compete for a different slice of the AI investing boom than the one that built Sound Ventures' reputation, with more specifics expected to emerge as the new firm takes shape.

Source: TechCrunch