Well-known Hollywood actor and lesser-known Silicon Valley investor Ashton Kutcher is leaving the venture capital firm he co-founded more than a decade ago, as he pivots to new bets on the resources and tech needed to support AI. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Kutcher is stepping away from Sound Ventures to start a new firm with Morgan Beller. Beller recently served as a general partner at venture firm NFX and previously helped create Meta’s cryptocurrency project Libra. A spokesperson for Kutcher told the newspaper that the two “are working together on an early-stage venture capital firm that will be focused on investing in a post-AGI world.” The move signals where at least some venture capital money may be headed next, away from the AI labs building frontier models and toward the data centers and energy projects needed to keep them growing. Conveniently, if the AI bubble ever bursts, some of those physical assets could still have uses beyond AI, making them a safer bet.
“Now is the right time for me to pursue the next wave of innovation—infrastructure, energy and deep tech,” Kutcher wrote in a letter obtained by The Wall Street Journal that Sound Ventures shared with its limited partners in May. Deep tech generally refers to companies built around major scientific or engineering breakthroughs rather than just software. That can include areas like quantum computing, nuclear energy, aerospace, and robotics.
