Ashton Kutcher has left Sound Ventures to launch a new venture capital firm with Morgan Beller

Ashton Kutcher is stepping down from Sound Ventures — the company he co-founded with Jay Oseary 11 years ago — to start a separate venture capital fund, the Wall Street Journal Fund. I mentioned. TechCrunch had separately heard that Kutcher was preparing to leave; The Wall Street Journal report confirms this and adds new details about his plans with Piller.

The actor and investor’s new firm was co-founded by Morgan Beller — its name has not yet been announced — who until recently was a general partner at venture capital-focused NFX and the cryptocurrency project previously involved with Meta’s Libra. Biller also spent nearly three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Kutcher’s exit doesn’t appear to be a sign of trouble at Sound Ventures — investors often leave underperforming companies, and that’s not the case here. The company, which has backed companies such as Brex and Gusto, was an early investor in OpenAI, Anthropic and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs.

The split is also notable for what it suggests about the next direction for AI funds: Sound has built its reputation on focused, high-conviction bets on class-leading AI labs, while Kutcher’s new fund appears to be going after the layer beneath those companies — the infrastructure and energy that power them.

“He and his fund consistently make it into (my) rankings of top unicorn investors. It’s an interesting case!” Ilya Strebolev, a finance professor at Stanford University who tracks the best-performing venture capital firms, Written on X.

The actor has Called Sam Altman from OpenAI Since Altman founded Loopt — years before the maker of ChatGPT launched.

Kutcher’s departure is due in part to differing views on which stages of startups to target for investments, with Sound leaning toward backing companies that are already more established, rather than betting on startups in their very early stages, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Kutcher and Biller focus on making early stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech startups — startups built on hard science and engineering breakthroughs rather than software alone.

Despite leaving Sound Ventures, Kutcher will continue to serve as an advisor to the company. Meanwhile, Oseary and Sound’s general partner, Evie Epstein, will advise Kutcher and Biller’s new company.