Well-known Hollywood actor and lesser-known Silicon Valley investor Ashton Kutcher is leaving the venture capital firm he co-founded more than a decade ago, as he pivots to new bets on the resources and tech needed to support AI.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Kutcher is stepping away from Sound Ventures to start a new firm with Morgan Beller. Beller recently served as a general partner at venture firm NFX and previously helped create Meta’s cryptocurrency project Libra.
A spokesperson for Kutcher told the newspaper that the two “are working together on an early-stage venture capital firm that will be focused on investing in a post-AGI world.”
The move signals where at least some venture capital money may be headed next, away from the AI labs building frontier models and toward the data centers and energy projects needed to keep them growing. Conveniently, if the AI bubble ever bursts, some of those physical assets could still have uses beyond AI, making them a safer bet.
“Now is the right time for me to pursue the next wave of innovation—infrastructure, energy and deep tech,” Kutcher wrote in a letter obtained by The Wall Street Journal that Sound Ventures shared with its limited partners in May.
Deep tech generally refers to companies built around major scientific or engineering breakthroughs rather than just software. That can include areas like quantum computing, nuclear energy, aerospace, and robotics.
This would be a new direction for Kutcher.
The actor founded Sound Ventures with Guy Oseary, the longtime manager of Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, in 2015. An unnamed source told The Wall Street Journal that the firm manages close to $2 billion.
Sound Ventures has invested in fintech companies like Brex, which serves businesses, and the buy-now, pay-later company Affirm. It has also backed the software development platform GitLab.
More recently, Sound Ventures has deployed more than $800 million into positions in Anthropic, OpenAI, and world-model startup World Labs, according to the letter sent to limited partners.
Inc. reported earlier this year that a leaked document revealed that Sound Ventures has 0.15% stake in OpenAI valued at $1.3 billion.
“He and his fund consistently make it onto our rankings of top unicorn investors. An interesting case!” wrote Ilya Strebulaev, founder and director of the Venture Capital Initiative at Stanford University, on X about Kutcher’s exit.
But it appears one reason for the split is that Kutcher no longer wants to stick with Sound’s strategy of backing more established companies. The letter said Kutcher and the Sound Ventures team had different visions that would require “different capital structures, different time horizons and different operational resources.”
Sound Ventures did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kutcher’s decision to leave the firm and pursue investments in infrastructure is another sign that some investors believe the next big opportunity in AI goes beyond the labs. It may be the massive infrastructure buildout needed to support them.
Even companies like Meta and SpaceX are working on leasing out their own data centers as they figure out whether their respective side hustles in AI are a fool’s errand.