Aside from accepting the "Utlimate Choice" Teen Choice award Sunday night, Ashton Kutcher has been busy promoting his new movie, the biopic "Jobs," which opens Friday. But playing the title role of Steve Jobs, the legendary founder of Cupertino tech giant Apple Inc., isn't Kutcher's only link to the Silicon Valley.
Although he is best known as an actor, Kutcher also is a long-time angel investor in tech companies, mostly in a string of Silicon Valley startups stretching from suburban San Jose to San Francisco.
Of the 33 investments Kutcher has made through his A-Grade Investments company, with partners Ron Burkle and Guy Oseary, the majority have been in Silicon Valley, according to CrunchBase.
Some have been profitable. For instance, in April 2012, he joined 35 other angel investors to fund SocialCam, which quickly grew to more than 50 million users, and was bought by AutoDesk for $60 million less than three months later.
Others have yet to pan out. His most-recent investments were participating in a $1.25 million seed round for San Francisco-based Propeller, a mobile app software developer, and a $3 million seed round for Palo Alto's Invi, a multimedia messenger service for mobile devices.
