Which Celebrities Are Investing in AI in 2026?

On July 1, 2026, Ashton Kutcher walked away from the firm that made him Silicon Valley’s most credible celebrity investor. Sound Ventures, which he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, closed an oversubscribed $240 million AI fund in May 2023 and used it to buy early positions in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stability AI. Those bets aged well. Reports built on a leaked OpenAI equity spreadsheet put Sound’s early $30 million OpenAI check at more than $1 billion on paper, per Yahoo Finance. And then, at what looks like the exact top of the celebrity AI trade, Kutcher left to start a new firm with former NFX general partner Morgan Beller, hunting AI infrastructure and energy deals instead of the labs everyone can already name.

That exit is the clearest signal yet of how fast this market is maturing. So which celebrities are investing in AI in 2026? More of them than ever, through more serious structures than ever. Celebrity AI investing in 2026 runs through three main routes: personal venture funds like Sound Ventures, angel checks in consumer AI rounds like Phia’s $35.5 million Series A, and equity stakes in working platforms like ElevenLabs, which added more than 30 actors, musicians, and athletes to its cap table in May. The names read like a premiere guest list. The money, increasingly, behaves like institutional capital.

Last updated: July 2026

Quick answers

Which celebrities are investing in AI in 2026?

The verified 2026 list clusters around four deals: Ashton Kutcher’s new infrastructure fund, ElevenLabs’ investor expansion, Phia’s Series A, and Carmelo Anthony’s Utopai stake. Phia and ElevenLabs each added more than 30 celebrity and entertainment-industry investors in the first half of 2026 alone, which makes this the busiest six months for celebrity AI money on record.

The table below maps the biggest verified names, what vehicle they used, and what each position actually signals.

Two patterns stand out. First, the deals are bigger and later-stage than the celebrity tech investing of the 2010s. Second, almost every check comes attached to a working relationship: a voice license, a production deal, a public endorsement. Passive fame money is going out of style.

The contrast with the last wave is instructive. A decade ago, celebrity tech investing meant lucky angel checks: Kutcher’s early positions in Uber and Airbnb, or Nas backing doorbell startup Ring through QueensBridge Venture Partners before Amazon bought it for roughly $1 billion in 2018. Those wins were real but scattershot, one famous person stumbling into one great deal. The 2026 version is systematic. Funds have investment committees. Angel cohorts are assembled by the startup, on purpose, for reach. The celebrities didn’t find AI. Consumer AI companies figured out how to recruit them.

Why did Ashton Kutcher leave Sound Ventures?

Kutcher left Sound Ventures on July 1, 2026 to co-found an early-stage venture firm with Morgan Beller focused on AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The split wasn’t a falling out. Kutcher stays on as an adviser to Sound, while Guy Oseary and Sound general partner Effie Epstein will advise the new firm.

The disagreement was about stage, according to the WSJ’s reporting. Sound has drifted toward established companies. Kutcher wants to write the first check again. His new partner is a serious pick: Beller was a general partner at seed firm NFX, spent nearly three years at Andreessen Horowitz, and co-led the Libra cryptocurrency project at Meta. Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks venture returns, wrote on X that Kutcher and his fund “consistently make it onto my rankings of top unicorn investors.”

The strategic read matters more than the personnel news. Sound built its reputation on concentrated bets in category-leading AI labs. Kutcher’s next fund is chasing the layer underneath those companies, the compute and power that every lab depends on. When the most successful celebrity AI investor moves down the stack, he’s telling you where he thinks the next decade of returns lives. The famous-logo trade is crowded. The picks-and-shovels trade isn’t. GreyJournal profiled how Sound Ventures and the Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC professionalized celebrity investing in our earlier analysis of celebrity-backed funds, and this move extends that arc: from fame-adjacent angel to boring, technical, institutional.

Did the Kardashians and Kris Jenner invest in AI?

Yes, and the deal is a case study in how consumer AI rounds now get built. Kris Jenner and Khloé Kardashian both hold stakes in Phia, the AI-powered shopping app founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni. Phia closed an oversubscribed $35.5 million Series A and revealed its investor list on CBS Mornings on May 29, 2026, per WWD. The roster runs past 30 names: Sydney Sweeney, Paris Hilton, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jessica Alba, Mindy Kaling, Alix Earle, Karlie Kloss, Halsey, Ice Spice, Ashley Graham, Bobbi Brown, Rachel Zoe, Leila Hormozi, Winnie Harlow, and LVMH scion Alexandre Arnault among them.

The structure tells the story. Kleiner Perkins led an $8 million seed in September 2025 that already included Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Sara Blakely, Michael Rubin, and Sheryl Sandberg, bringing Phia’s total funding to $43.5 million. The app claims 1.5 million users and more than 9,600 retail brand partners. We broke down the product mechanics in our explainer on how Phia works, and the pattern is deliberate: dozens of small celebrity checks, each carrying an audience, stacked into a launch machine no ad budget could buy. Hailey Bieber’s seed position fits the same playbook she used building Rhode, which we covered in our Hailey Bieber net worth analysis.

One caveat belongs in any honest Phia writeup. In November 2025, Fortune reported that security researchers found the app collecting more user data than its disclosures stated, a claim the company disputed. Celebrity distribution can accelerate a consumer app’s rise. It can’t inoculate one against scrutiny.

Why are actors buying into ElevenLabs?

Because voice is the one asset actors already own, and ElevenLabs is becoming the market where it gets licensed. In May 2026, the company announced that Jamie Foxx, Eva Longoria, and Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk had joined more than 30 high-profile actors, musicians, athletes, and entertainment executives investing for the first time, alongside existing backers like Matthew McConaughey. The same round brought in BlackRock, Wellington, D.E. Shaw, Schroders, NVIDIA’s NVentures, Salesforce, Santander, and Deutsche Telekom’s T.Capital.

The numbers behind the celebrity interest are unusually hard. ElevenLabs ended 2025 with $350 million in annual recurring revenue and surpassed $500 million ARR within the first four months of 2026, according to the company’s own announcement from CEO Mati Staniszewski. TechCrunch pegged the Series D valuation at $11 billion, up from $6.6 billion the previous September. The company now employs 530 people across more than 50 countries and closed a $100 million employee tender offer, its second in under a year.

For talent, this is a hedge dressed as an investment. AI dubbing, translation, and synthetic voice will reshape how entertainment gets made and distributed, and the people whose voices carry that industry want equity in the platform doing the reshaping. “AI is transforming how stories are told and who they can reach,” Longoria said in the announcement. McConaughey has already used the platform to voice content in Spanish. Hwang’s participation points at the global angle: a Korean showrunner betting that AI translation expands where stories travel. The lesson for founders reads clean. Celebrities invest hardest where the product touches their own income stream.

How do celebrities invest in AI startups?

Three routes cover nearly every celebrity AI position in 2026: personal venture funds, angel checks, and operator stakes. Each carries different money, different diligence, and different value to the startup taking it.

Personal funds are the institutional route. Sound Ventures raised a dedicated $240 million AI fund in May 2023, per Variety, and deployed it into OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stability AI. Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners works the same way, writing $500,000 to $5 million checks into early-stage companies. One of Marcy’s positions, an AI supply-chain startup funded at a $50 million valuation in 2020, went public at $3.2 billion in 2026, a 64x paper return we detailed in our Jay-Z business playbook. These funds employ real investment teams and compete for allocation like any other VC.

Angel checks are the visible route. The Phia round shows the current model: many small checks from many famous people, where the real contribution is the post announcing the investment. The startup gets reach. The celebrity gets upside and a tech credential.

Operator stakes are the deepest route. Carmelo Anthony didn’t just invest roughly $5 million in Utopai Studios at its $1 billion valuation, per Forbes. His Creative 7 Productions label produces AI-generated video content with the studio, which makes him a customer and business partner as much as a shareholder. Deals like these usually arrive through business managers and family offices rather than cold pitches, and they’re the hardest for founders to land.

Which celebrities own AI companies?

Owning an AI company and investing in one are different games, and 2026 has clear examples of each. On the ownership side, Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni founded and run Phia; they’re operators with founder equity, board seats, and the workload that comes with 9,600 retail partnerships. will.i.am founded FYI, his AI-powered messaging and creative collaboration app, and has run it as CEO rather than passive backer. Carmelo Anthony sits between categories, holding equity in Utopai while producing content through his own label.

The investor column is longer: the Phia angel cohort, the ElevenLabs talent group, and fund operators like Kutcher and Jay-Z hold minority stakes without operating duties. The distinction matters for anyone reading these announcements as signals. A founder-celebrity has committed years and reputation. An angel-celebrity has committed a check and a post. Sydney Sweeney illustrates the spectrum well: she wrote an angel check into Phia, but she’s a founder-operator at her own venture-backed brand, a structure we examined in our SYRN business model breakdown. Expect more celebrities to cross from the check-writing column into the operating column as AI tooling drops the cost of building.

What celebrity AI money means for founders

A celebrity check is a distribution deal priced as equity. That’s the working definition founders should carry into any conversation with a famous investor, and it explains both when the money helps and when it’s noise.

It helps when awareness is your bottleneck. Phia converted its cap table into a CBS Mornings segment and weeks of press coverage, the kind of launch a seed-stage consumer app can’t buy. It helps when the celebrity uses the product in public, the way McConaughey voices real content with ElevenLabs. And it helps when the investor’s audience overlaps your actual buyer, which is why creator-economy operators like Alix Earle and Leila Hormozi showed up in a shopping app’s round. The attention economics work the same way they do for the creators in our highest-paid TikTokers ranking: audience is capital.

It’s noise when you’re building infrastructure. Kutcher’s new fund thesis is the tell here. Energy and compute companies win on engineering and contracts, not on fame, which is exactly why his infrastructure vehicle is a professional two-GP firm rather than a celebrity syndicate. A famous name on a B2B cap table might get you a meeting. It won’t close one.

Three tests before taking the check. Does this person’s audience actually buy what you sell? Will they use the product where people can see it? And is the check displacing an investor who’d contribute real work? If you get two yeses, the equity is probably well spent. If you’re a solo builder weighing whether any of this applies at your scale, the economics in our look at solo founders running $1M+ AI businesses suggest distribution partnerships matter more, not less, when headcount is one.

The map of which celebrities are investing in AI in 2026 will keep shifting, but the direction is set: away from novelty checks, toward funds, operator deals, and infrastructure. Follow the money down the stack.