Ashton Kutcher's VC firm Sound Ventures (co-led by general partners Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein) is betting on AI, including an investment in Fei-Fei Li's World Labs. investors confirmed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday.
The startup, founded by Professor Lee of Stanford University, known as the “Godmother of AI,” has already raised $230 million from investors including a16z, NEA, and Radical Ventures, and is valued at more than $1 billion. It is evaluated as. The company aims to develop “big world models” that can understand and interact with 3D worlds, and is targeting game companies and movie studios as its first customers. The latter is an area where the Hollywood actor-turned-investor can provide input.
Sound Ventures' $265 million AI fund, announced last year, has invested in a variety of large language model and AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Stability AI, and Magic.dev.
Notably, Kutcher said today that the company has not yet sold any OpenAI shares, further confirming that these investors believe the company will continue to grow. It will be.
The team is also interested in startups working to bring AI technology to new physical form factors or, in some cases, new operating systems.
“The existing operating systems for the existing form factors and hardware that we have, [AI]but we're really interested in that space,” Oseary said.
He said Sound Ventures had met with AI pin maker Humane two years ago to invest in Rabbit, an AI hardware startup co-founded by Jesse Lyu.
“The reason we were so excited to build Jesse is because of the Large Action Model component. So we actually think that the hardware will be largely irrelevant over time. The form factor is important. It wasn’t,” Epstein said of Sounds Ventures’ interest in combining AI and hardware.
“Maybe today it looks like a dongle that resembles a cell phone, but tomorrow it looks like something else and eventually becomes irrelevant,” she continued. “But this software can… learn our preferences and take actions on our behalf. And in fact, it's possible that such companies could actually be founded and disrupt companies like Apple. There are moments when there is sex,” Epstein said.
“For us, it wasn't a hardware play. We seriously looked at it as an investment in a different underlying model,” she added.
The VC firm is also interested in investing in new AI devices being built by legendary Apple designer Jony Ive in collaboration with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In fact, Kutcher said he “spoken to Johnny today,” but TechCrunch understands that a term sheet has not yet been signed.
“Someone is going to make a breakthrough in this field, and it's going to be very helpful and very profound for all of us,” Kutcher said.