Ashton Kutcher raised a $243 million investment fund in just five weeks that will focus on 'the next absolute transformation' in tech
The fund will invest in A.I., which he acknowledged is in a so-called hype cycle.
Ashton Kutcher, the Hollywood actor and venture capital investor, raised the money for his firm’s new AI fund quickly.
“We pulled the fund together in about five weeks,” Kutcher said Thursday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We have a base of LPs that have been with us for years on end.”
Kutcher’s new fund plans to put $243 million toward artificial intelligence startups, the tech industry’s current hottest category. The portfolio already includes investments in AI startup darlings OpenAI, Stability AI Ltd. and Anthropic.
With the new fund, assets under management at Los Angeles-based Sound Ventures LLC are about $1 billion, the firm said. Kutcher said the firm had surveyed its portfolio companies to see how they were embracing AI, and that the sector would mark “the next absolute transformation for technology.”
“We’ve been investing in AI for the last seven years,” Kutcher said. “But when we saw GPT be launched, we realized that this was an absolute breakthrough.”
He acknowledged the so-called hype cycle that washes across technology investing, most recently with the rush into crypto, a field where Sound Ventures also has been active. The blockchain technology at the heart of cryptocurrency has value in a number of applications, he said, while “tokenization” in many areas went too far.
Regulation of AI is “needed badly,” he said
Regulation of AI is “needed badly,” he said, just as it is in the crypto industry.
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Ashton Kutcher explains why he’s betting on AI, but not trying to pick a ‘winner’
Ashton Kutcher, co-founder of Sound Ventures, believes that every company is going to become an AI company, but that there might not be a winner in the space.
The actor and investor spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday alongside Sound co-founder Guy Oseary and partner Effie Epstein to detail what the firm is looking for in founders and startups, and how they believe foundational AI companies are setting the stage for the future.
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“Foundation layer AI companies are going to be some of the most valuable companies that have ever been created in the history of humankind,” Kutcher said.
He said it’s easy to underestimate how big of a deal AI is, and that he believes foundational AI models are going to be the foundation of everything to come.
“There will not be a company in the world that is not, in some way, shape or form, using AI in the future,” Kutcher said. “So every company is going to be an AI company. And it’s our thesis that whether it’s open source AI, whether it’s closed systems like Anthropic or OpenAI or World Labs, or whether you’re building software using Magic.dev, those things are going to be the underpinnings of everything else.”
However, he doesn’t think there will be a winner in the space. He believes that while foundational AI companies converge in some ways, they are also differentiating.
“Sometimes you can get too smart and too cute and think that you can pick the winner, and there might not be a winner,” Kutcher said. “It might not be in one of these monopoly spaces, because there’s a lot of different people that stand up gain a lot from AI and AGI in general.”
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