Ashton Kutcher Launches New VC Firm With Morgan Beller
Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to start a new venture firm with former NFX general partner Morgan Beller, the Wall Street Journal reported on July 1, 2026, per TechCrunch and TheNextWeb. The new, as-yet-unnamed firm will target early-stage bets in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, rather than the more established, category-leading AI labs Sound Ventures is known for backing, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs. TechCrunch reports the split partly reflects differing views on investment stage, with Sound favoring later, more established companies. Kutcher will continue advising Sound Ventures, while Sound co-founder Guy Oseary and general partner Effie Epstein will advise the new firm.
The more useful signal here for AI-infrastructure builders isn't the celebrity name, it's the direction of capital: as TechCrunch frames it, Sound Ventures built its reputation on concentrated bets in category-leading AI labs, while Kutcher's new fund is explicitly chasing the layer underneath those labs, the infrastructure and energy that powers them, which suggests specialized early-stage investors see more unclaimed opportunity in picks-and-shovels AI infrastructure than in backing another frontier lab.
What happened
Ashton Kutcher is stepping away from Sound Ventures, the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to start a new venture firm with Morgan Beller, a former general partner at seed-focused NFX who also spent nearly three years at Andreessen Horowitz and co-led Meta's Libra cryptocurrency project, according to the Wall Street Journal's report, confirmed and detailed further by TechCrunch and TheNextWeb. The new firm's name and fund size have not been disclosed. Kutcher will continue to advise Sound Ventures, while Oseary and Sound general partner Effie Epstein will advise the new firm.
Industry context
Sound Ventures has backed Brex, Gusto, and was an early investor in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs, per TechCrunch. TechCrunch reports the new firm will focus on early-stage AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, startups built around hard science and engineering rather than software alone, and that the split partly reflects a difference in view on investment stage: Sound has leaned toward backing companies that are already more established, while Kutcher and Beller want to bet earlier. Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks top-performing VCs, called the move "an interesting case" on X, noting Kutcher's fund consistently ranks among top unicorn investors.
For practitioners
A well-capitalized fund explicitly targeting AI infrastructure and energy at the earliest stages is a concrete signal that specialized investors see room to fund physical and infrastructure-layer AI bets (compute, power, deep tech) rather than only downstream model or application companies. Founders and teams working on power-aware compute, custom accelerators, or other capital-intensive infrastructure problems may find this and similarly focused early-stage funds more receptive to pre-product pitches than generalist VCs.
What to watch
Disclosure of the new firm's name and fund size, its first announced investments (which will indicate whether it leans toward compute/power infrastructure or broader deep tech), and whether Sound Ventures adjusts its own stage focus in response to losing a co-founder to an earlier-stage strategy.
Key Points
- 1Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, which he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to start a new firm with Morgan Beller.
- 2The new firm will target early-stage AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, contrasting with Sound's later-stage bets on labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- 3The split signals specialized investor interest is shifting toward the infrastructure and energy layer beneath frontier AI labs, not just the labs themselves.
Scoring Rationale
A notable VC leadership move with a clear, well-corroborated strategic signal (a shift of specialized capital toward AI infrastructure/energy rather than frontier labs), useful context for founders and practitioners in that space. Company/individual-level story rather than industry-shaking, so kept in the notable-but-not-major tier.
Sources
Primary source and supporting public references used for this report.
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