Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures Closed a $240M Fund To Invest In Generative AI
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
On Monday, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures announced the firm closed an oversubscribed $240 million AI fund and will invest $35 million to $50 million into each company it selects.
As previously reported by dot.LA, this AI fund comes two years after the close of Sound’s third fund. The Beverly Hills-based firm was founded in 2015 by Kutcher and former talent scout Guy Oseary. The former Marsh head of strategy and planning Effie Epstein joined as a General Partner in 2017.
“Sound’s AI fund will invest in foundation model layer businesses, including large language models as well as stable diffusion models,” Epstein told dot.LA. “Since one of the biggest bottlenecks to building foundation models is access to technical talent, we will focus on businesses with exceptional technical talent at the helm, as well as access to cloud and compute.”
While Epstein was unable to share which companies they have set their eyes on for this fund, Sound’s portfolio already includes artificial intelligence companies OpenAI, Anthropic and StabilityAI.
“We believe that the current capabilities in AI are representative of a platform shift that will be pervasive across sectors and geographies,” she said. “We are proud to partner with leaders in this space and be in the conversation to responsibly shape the future of this technology.”
The firm currently manages over $1 billion in assets across all of its funds. Prior investments include rental platform Airbnb, rideshare app Uber, digital payments solution Affirm and automation workflow tool Forethought among others.
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Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
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