Last year, Sound Ventures, the 9-year-old, Beverly Hills, California-based venture firm led by general partners Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, and Effie Epstein, announced a new $265 million AI fund that was betting big on large language model companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face.
In fact, the plan was to invest in just six companies — a risky but potentially lucrative bet on the team’s vision of the future, where, because of the technical talent required and the capital needed to cover compute costs, the biggest winners in AI will be few and massive.
Sound has since raised more money for that same fund. It also appears to have stuck to its mission, judging by the few deals it has publicly disclosed in 2024, and we’re thrilled to be hosting all three at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 to dish about their strategy — along with the trends they are tracking right now.
Kutcher has perhaps made the transition between the worlds of acting and investing more seamlessly than anyone else in Hollywood, starting on his venture path in 2010 with the launch of A-Grade Investments with talent manager and business partner Guy Oseary, whose early bets on Airbnb and Uber helped cement their reputation for getting into the right deals at the right time.
The two, who went on to found Sound Ventures in 2014, brought aboard Epstein several years later to complement their own skill sets. Epstein previously led global strategy at the Marsh & McLennan subsidiary Marsh. She also served as SVP of planning and head of investor relations at iHeartMedia, and before that, she worked in business development at Clear.
Epstein also previously worked in investment banking in the energy sector, bringing a diverse set of experiences and contacts to the table.
In fact, in addition to Sound Ventures, the three also run SoundWaves, an investment vehicle dedicated to the next generation of clean, circular, and sustainable businesses, which are good for the environment and often hard to scale and sustain; we’ll talk with them about this, too.
You definitely don’t want to miss this fireside on the Disrupt Stage, where you’ll be among the 10,000 tech, startup, and VC leaders attending Disrupt 2024. Register today to lock in your ticket price before it goes up at the door.
