Molten, An Enterprise Software Startup, Raises $7M In Seed Funding From Ashton Kutcher, Michael Ovitz, Jack Dorsey & Other Backers
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Molten, an enterprise cloud startup aiming to deliver a comprehensive set of insights for clients across several parts of the evolving streaming marketplace, has raised $7 million in seed funding.
Initial backers of the company include actor, producer and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz.
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Arjun Mendhi, CEO and founder of Molten, developed the company after a stint as an engineer and product exec. His vision was to create a tool optimized for the streaming era that could combine information about licensing, distribution and accounting. Existing solutions have tended to treat each of those business lines separately. That, Molten believes, has led to fragmentation of operations, in turn limiting the ability of companies to scale and subjecting them to higher costs and legal risk.
Since Molten launched in beta in late 2019, it says it has attracted customers from six continents. Today, the company says it manages hundreds of millions of film and TV rights and hundreds of terabytes of content for catalogs worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The seed round was led by Abstract Ventures. Other participants in the seed round include 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.
Molten is “an essential innovation needed to equip media and entertainment companies to scale effectively in the global streaming era,” Ovitz said.
“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 Ramtin Naimi, a partner in Abstract Ventures.
“We exist to empower media rights-holders, such as production, distribution, and streaming organizations,” said Mendhi, who has experienced the challenges of the modern streaming ecosystem also as a musician and artist. “We value the opportunity to help our customers thrive in the rapidly changing media industry.”
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