Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, the venture firm he co-founded roughly eleven years ago, to launch a new early-stage investment vehicle alongside Morgan Beller, TechCrunch reported July 1, 2026. Beller previously co-led the Libra project — later rebranded Diem — Meta's ambitious and ultimately abandoned cryptocurrency initiative, and has since served as a general partner at seed firm NFX after nearly three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
The move is framed as a stage mismatch: Sound Ventures has increasingly gravitated toward later-stage, concentrated, high-conviction bets in category-leading AI labs, while Kutcher wants to return to writing very early checks into younger companies. Sound Ventures' portfolio includes Brex, Gusto, OpenAI, Anthropic and World Labs (Fei-Fei Li's company) — a list dominated by companies that were already well past their earliest stages by the time Sound Ventures invested, or that have grown into some of the most valuable private companies in the world.
The new firm's stated thesis is a deliberate pivot: early-stage investing in AI infrastructure, energy and deep tech — companies built around hard science and engineering breakthroughs rather than software alone. That positioning puts Kutcher and Beller in a different lane than most celebrity-affiliated funds, which have historically leaned toward consumer, media and lifestyle-adjacent startups rather than capital-intensive deep tech.
Kutcher will remain involved with Sound Ventures as an adviser even after departing as an active investor, while Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein — both Sound Ventures principals — will advise Kutcher's new firm in return, suggesting an amicable, structured transition rather than a rupture. Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks top venture investors, noted that Kutcher and his fund consistently rank among his lists of top unicorn investors, underscoring that this is a credible operator making a deliberate strategic pivot rather than a novelty celebrity fund restructuring.
The timing lines up with a broader 2026 shift in venture capital toward energy and physical infrastructure as AI's compute demands strain power grids and supply chains — the same dynamic underpinning this week's Arcturus seed round targeting grid electrical losses, and Amazon and SpaceX's satellite-infrastructure buildouts covered elsewhere in the AI ecosystem this year.
For founders building in energy, deep tech or AI infrastructure at the earliest stages, a well-capitalized, well-connected new entrant explicitly targeting that segment is a meaningful new source of check-writing at a stage where capital has historically been scarcer than at later rounds. For LPs, Beller's addition brings genuine fintech and crypto-infrastructure pedigree to complement Kutcher's celebrity-fund distribution advantages — a combination that could differentiate the new firm from both traditional deep-tech VCs and other celebrity-affiliated vehicles.
What to watch: what the new firm is named and how large its debut fund is once those details become public, whether it can compete for the best early-stage deep-tech deals against dedicated funds like Lowercarbon and Congruent Ventures, and whether Sound Ventures' remaining team shifts even further toward later-stage, concentrated bets now that Kutcher has departed.