Ashton Kutcher launches new early-stage VC fund with Morgan Beller

Ashton Kutcher left Sound Ventures to launch a separate venture fund with Morgan Beller, a former NFX general partner who helped co-lead Meta’s Libra cryptocurrency effort and spent nearly three years at Andreessen Horowitz. The new firm’s name has not been made public, but the mandate is clear: early-stage bets in AI infrastructure, energy and deep tech.

The split puts two different venture styles side by side. Kutcher and Beller are targeting startups at the seed and early-growth edge of the market, while Sound Ventures is leaning more toward companies that are already more established. Kutcher will continue to advise Sound Ventures, and Guy Oseary and general partner Effie Epstein will advise the new firm, keeping a direct line between the two shops even as their investment focus diverges.

Beller arrives with a résumé built for frontier technology investing. NFX announced her as its fourth general partner in September 2020, saying she had co-founded Libra and Facebook’s Novi wallet at age 25. Before that, she had worked on the deal team at Andreessen Horowitz. Her move with Kutcher adds another prominent name to the roster of celebrity-adjacent funds trying to compete on judgment rather than fame alone.

Sound Ventures has already established that it can get into coveted deals. The firm backed Brex and Gusto and was an early investor in OpenAI, Anthropic and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. It also raised an AI fund of about $265.8 million in 2023 and has said it manages more than $1 billion in assets. Those numbers place Sound among the more visible crossover firms in the market, with a portfolio that has included Airbnb, Uber, Airtable, GitLab and Hugging Face.

Kutcher’s next move suggests the celebrity-backed VC playbook is changing. Star power still opens doors, but the market now rewards a narrower edge: technical sector knowledge, the right partner, and a thesis that reaches into the infrastructure beneath the model layer. Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks top-performing venture investors, has publicly noted that Kutcher and Sound remain regular names on his top-unicorn-investor rankings, a reminder that the most durable brand in venture now comes from returns, not recognition.