Analysis
Ashton Kutcher announced on July 1, 2026 that he is leaving Sound Ventures, the venture firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to launch a new fund alongside Morgan Beller. Beller was until recently a general partner at seed-focused NFX and previously co-led Libra, Meta's ill-fated cryptocurrency project. Kutcher will continue advising Sound Ventures, and Oseary along with Sound general partner Effie Epstein will advise the new firm in return — an unusually collaborative split for two GPs parting ways.
The stated reason for the split is a disagreement over investment stage: Sound Ventures has increasingly leaned toward backing more established, later-stage companies, while Kutcher wants to return to making concentrated early-stage bets. The new firm's stated focus — AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, meaning startups built around hard-science and engineering breakthroughs rather than software alone — is a deliberate pivot away from the consumer and media-adjacent bets that made Kutcher's name as an investor (his early stakes in Airbnb, Uber and Spotify were largely consumer/marketplace plays).
The move fits a broader 2026 pattern: celebrity and consumer-capital investors are increasingly chasing capital-intensive, technically differentiated categories — power generation, grid infrastructure, specialized chips — where the AI buildout has created genuinely new venture-scale opportunities that didn't exist five years ago. Beller's fintech-infrastructure background (Libra was, in essence, an attempt to build a global payments rail) gives the new firm real domain credibility beyond Kutcher's celebrity distribution.
Comparable moves: several operator-celebrity investors have launched or refocused funds toward deep tech this year as the AI capex buildout ($725B combined across hyperscalers) creates enormous downstream demand for power, cooling and specialized infrastructure that traditional software VCs are less equipped to underwrite.
What to watch: the size of the new fund's first close, whether it can win allocation in competitive AI-infra and energy deals against specialist deep-tech VCs like Lowercarbon and DCVC, and whether Sound Ventures' later-stage pivot pays off without its highest-profile co-founder.
