Gerry Cardinale‘s RedBird Capital Partners, coming off its major investment in David Ellison’s Skydance, announced a pact with Guy Oseary‘s Sound Ventures to jointly invest up to $1 billion in “emerging platforms at the convergence of technology, media and culture.”
As part of the agreement, RedBird will contribute the “expertise” of RedBird X, the firm’s dedicated AI investment and incubation platform.
New York-based RedBird has investments in more than 50 companies, which in aggregate represent $205 billion in enterprise value. RedBird had invested $2 billion in Ellison’s Skydance Media for its takeover of Paramount Global, a deal that closed in August 2025 and invested $4 billion more in the company for Paramount’s Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The firm also has invested in Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Artists Equity, Ari Emanuel’s Mari global events and experiences company and the Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Boston Red Sox and other sports teams and businesses. RedBird recently inked a deal acquiring control of Puck, valuing the media start-up at $250 million.
Sound Ventures, led by Oseary and Effie Epstein, is an L.A.-based venture-capital firm with more than $2 billion in assets. It has invested in companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Airbnb, GitLab, Hugging Face, Robinhood, Spotify, Uber and World Labs. In addition to his investing activities, Oseary is a talent manager who is Madonna’s longtime manager.
Cardinale, founder and managing partner of RedBird Capital Partners, said, “The next great technology companies and the entrepreneur founders behind them need versatile partners who understand the long-term trajectory of company building and alpha generation. Sound Ventures has established a strong track record built on founder relationships and high conviction plays in technology and AI, which includes early investments in both Anthropic and OpenAI. This partnership puts the power of RedBird’s institutional investment platform and strategic network firmly behind this next generation of business builders.”
Said Oseary, “RedBird brings a different kind of outlook that complements what we have built at Sound, with the resources and scale to compound the impact of our investments.”
Hamid Biglari, RedBird partner and executive chairman of RedBird X, added: “RedBird X’s role in this partnership is to bring the same AI expertise we apply across our own portfolio to work alongside Sound’s team on diligence, portfolio support and helping companies maximize their potential. It’s a natural extension of what we do across RedBird’s broader platform, now applied at even greater scale.”
Sound Ventures’ Epstein commented: “Our two firms bring a shared ambition to invest at the forefront of innovation and support companies as they scale. RedBird is renowned for working closely with the businesses it backs, which mirrors our approach. Together we can help founders access the people, opportunities and resources that accelerate their ambitions.”