Cloud-based content rights and media tech company Molten said it has raised $7 million in seed funding from a group of investors including actor and tech entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher and former superagent, Creative Artists Agency co-founder and The Walt Disney Co. president Michael Ovitz, to help it further develop its operations.
The funding round, which Molten CEO Arjun Mendhi said was “significantly oversubscribed,” was led by Abstract Ventures, which includes among its investors Kutcher and Ovitz. They join Twitter founder Jack Dorsey; Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman; entertainment attorney Kevin Yorn; former Axel Springer CFO Steffen Naumann; former T. Rowe Price Global Investments CEO Todd Ruppert; and Carta CEO Henry Ward. Other participating venture capital funds include Lakestar and Valor Capital Group.
Dorsey has been a long-time investor in Molten, and has provided insight and support to the company throughout its three-year history. Mendhi said that he hopes the other participating investors will share their expertise with Molten as it expands its product line and enters new markets.
“While the media and entertainment industry is going through incredible growth, the increasing complexity of the various data streams demands modernization of back-office operations. Molten’s cloud technology is the platform we need now to connect people, data and processes within media organizations,” said Abstract Ventures partner Ramtin Naimi in a statement. “We are excited to invest in this business and support its mission to simplify processes and lower operating costs for the media industry.”
In an interview, Mendhi said one of Molten’s top priorities will be to invest further in research and development.
“We have a technology advantage at this point; we are going to invest in that and further strengthen that technology advantage,” Mendhi said in an interview, adding that the company also will focus on scaling operations. Molten has about 12 employees currently and should expand to “at least 20” by this time next year.
Mendhi founded Molten in 2018 and the company launched the beta version of its software a year later. Since then, Molten has attracted customers from six continents that manage hundreds of millions of film and TV rights and hundreds of terabytes of content on the Molten platform.
