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Ashton Kutcher Leaves Sound Ventures to Launch New AI Infrastructure VC Firm with Morgan Beller
Ashton Kutcher is departing Sound Ventures to co-found a new venture capital firm with Morgan Beller, pivoting from AI lab investments toward infrastructure and energy. The move signals a broader shift in AI venture focus from model-layer companies to the underlying compute and power systems.
Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, the firm he co-founded, to launch a new venture capital firm alongside Morgan Beller, TechCrunch reported exclusively on July 1. The new fund will focus on AI infrastructure and energy — the layer beneath the AI model companies.
Sound Ventures built its reputation on concentrated, high-conviction bets in category-leading AI labs, including successful investments in OpenAI and Anthropic. Kutcher and partner Guy Oseary established a distinctive presence in AI venture investing through these high-stakes wagers.
The strategic shift is significant. Rather than continuing to chase AI application-layer companies, Kutcher's new firm will target the infrastructure and energy that power them — data centers, compute resources, and power supply chains that underpin the entire AI ecosystem.
Morgan Beller brings deep infrastructure investing experience. She was a co-founder of Paradigm, a leading crypto venture firm, and a key figure behind Facebook's Libra (later Diem) stablecoin project. Her background complements Kutcher's AI lab investing expertise.
This move reflects a maturing AI investment landscape. As foundational AI models become commoditized and commercialized, investor attention is rotating from model-layer companies to the physical and digital infrastructure that supports them. Energy, data center capacity, and networking hardware are emerging as the next frontier.
Sound Ventures will continue operating with Guy Oseary remaining at the helm. Kutcher's departure represents a strategic reorientation for him personally rather than a wind-down of the existing firm.
Key sectors to watch for the new fund include AI-specialized chips, data center energy solutions, and networking infrastructure for training and inference. These areas have been dominated by big tech and a handful of specialist VCs; new capital could accelerate competition.
The next milestones will be the fund's target size and its first investments. Kutcher's broad network across entertainment and technology, combined with Beller's infrastructure expertise, gives the new firm a distinctive profile in the evolving AI venture landscape.
Why it matters
The new fund signals a rotation in AI venture capital from model-layer investments toward infrastructure and energy, potentially accelerating competition in AI compute and data center markets.