Ashton Kutcher is departing Sound Ventures — the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago — to start a separate venture capital fund with Morgan Beller, the Wall Street Journal reported. The new firm's name has not been disclosed.
Morgan Beller was until recently a general partner at seed-focused VC firm NFX, and previously co-led the Libra cryptocurrency project at Meta. She also spent nearly three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Kutcher's exit does not appear to signal trouble at Sound Ventures: the firm has backed companies such as Brex and Gusto and was an early investor in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. Instead, the move reflects differences in investment stage preferences between Kutcher and his former co-founders.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the split was partly driven by divergent views on which startup stages to target. Sound Ventures has leaned toward supporting companies that are already more established, while Kutcher prefers making very early-stage investments.
The new fund that Kutcher and Beller are building will focus on early-stage startups in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech — companies grounded in hard science and engineering breakthroughs rather than software alone.
Observers see the change as indicative of where AI capital may flow next: Sound established a reputation for concentrated, high-conviction bets in category-leading AI labs, whereas Kutcher and Beller are aiming at the layer beneath those firms — the infrastructure and energy solutions that power them. Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks top-performing VCs, noted on X that Kutcher and his fund consistently rank among top unicorn investors and called the situation an interesting case.
Kutcher has longstanding ties in the AI community; he has known OpenAI CEO Sam Altman since Altman founded Loopt, years before OpenAI emerged.
Although Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures operationally, he will continue to serve as an adviser to the firm. Meanwhile, Guy Oseary and Sound general partner Effie Epstein will provide advisory support to Kutcher and Beller’s new fund.
Details such as the new firm's official name and its planned fund size have not been made public.
