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, just as it is in the crypto industry.